– Hi everyone. I’m Niya Bond, the Faculty Developer here at OneHE, and I’m thrilled to be back again with Laura Gibbs who is going to be talking to us about unessays or Non-disposable Assignments. Laura, thanks so much for joining us. I’m really excited about this topic. I know you mentioned it in a webinar that you did for us, and you were so kind to come back and tell us more about it.

– It’s funny, when I started thinking about how I needed to prep for this, I realized there’s nothing I like better to talk about than this whole area of non-disposable assignments and unessays. And just to get ready, I went ahead and googled both terms to see what’s going on out there with both of these terms, because they’re very Googleable and I was so inspired. So the non-disposable assignments term is a bit older, it’s a bit clunky, it’s not as popular. But if you google non-disposable assignments, there are so many great blog posts, and articles, and essays, and ideas going all the way back to some stuff that David Wiley was working on maybe 15 years ago. It’s a long time. There’s a lot of stuff.

But unessay somehow really seems to have captured people’s imaginations, which is great, ’cause part of this is all about imagining new things. And so that one I think is even better, when you Google it now, all kinds of people are sharing their ideas for unessays, how they use them in classes, and it’s become, I think, so widespread that you could even Google your discipline. Like say, you know, unessay anthropology or unessay sociology and just see what comes up. So I’m glad to talk with you here, but if you only have like two minutes, don’t even listen to me. Just go Google it right now, because you’re gonna find amazing stuff out there. And the basic idea is that instead of having students write something that’s gonna go into either the literal trash can at the end of the semester or the virtual trash can, and as far as I’m concerned, the learning management system is just a big virtual trash can, we can do that differently. And once you say to yourself I’m gonna do it differently, the possibilities really are endless. And so that’s, to me, what makes it exciting. It’s not a negative challenge of like trying to get away from something. It’s more a challenge of where can I go that’s new and different and take my students with me.

– I love that idea. So for those in our community who aren’t sure what these kinds of assignments can entail, can you just describe, I know you’ve used them a lot in your practice, can you describe a few and what form they take?

– Yeah, the way I started doing this was that I fell in love with the internet back in 1999, and I realized that for me, this was where work could happen that would be meaningful to a broader audience. That even though I work in sort of niche topics, unusual things, at that point, I was researching weasels and folklore around the world. No topic is so niche that you can’t find someone else on the internet who’s gonna be interested in what you do. And so I right away decided that my students would put their work on the internet and that was great. They were very motivated to do that. They were excited about the challenge. It was something really weird and different back then in 1999. But what happens when they do that is that they get to reach new audiences at the time, right? So that could be their peers, or their family, or their friends where they get to share their work with them. And it also gives you the opportunity to expand your audience into the future.

So I always thought about, what can my students now in this class contribute to future classes? And students were so motivated to do that. So that can be like big things, like class projects that they put online and that then become part of an archive or gallery for your future classes. But listen, it can also be something really small. So think about like those end of course evaluations that we do that are just terrible. Those are great example of a disposable assignment. It means nothing. Like why students are even motivated to fill out those end of semester evaluations, I don’t even know. But if you turn that into advice for next semester students, then the students like generosity, and creativity, and lessons learned, it just all comes pouring out. So that’s an example of a really small but simple and powerful non-disposable assignment you can do, where instead of the idea of it being some private secret, no one’s gonna know about it evaluation, which just makes faculty nervous too. It’s not productive. Turn that into, like, I used a Padlet to do it where students just posted their advice to next semester’s students. It brought out all their generosity and creativity, and, then, it was useful. At the beginning of the next semester, it’s like, hey everybody, here’s some advice from last semester students. How easy is that? And it’s really transformative.

– It sounds like it, and it sounds like you were an early adopter of kind of balancing course content with lived experiences and practicality beyond the classroom and creating those connections, which is awesome. Oh, okay.

– Oh, go ahead.

– Well, I was just gonna say, course content is a really interesting way to look at it too, like how much of your course content can be either written by students, or curated by students, so that you have like student voices as part of your content through their involvement in it. And that could even just be as simple as having them rate the content, you know, where the idea is, that they’re responding to it, they’re reacting to it in a way that allows you to improve the content. You can say, “Here is the favourite reading from last semester students,” you know, “I’m so glad to offer this to you. Help me figure out what’s gonna be the best readings for next semester students,” and turn it into an ongoing process.

– I love that and I love the idea of the pedagogical partnerships that you’re establishing, like learners have a stake in the content. It’s not just transactional.

– And there’s so much content out there, and this is where this intersects really nicely with the open educational resources movement. There’s all kinds of content out there that wants to be remixed and changed. There’s not a lot you can do with your traditional textbook, but if you’re using some kind of OER textbook, the whole point is to remix it, to reuse it in ways that are more applicable to your students, your context, their interests, their needs. So, OER is another phenomenon that’s taken shape over these past 20 years that intersects with this perfectly.

You know, so whenever I see textbooks that teachers have done together with their students, I’m just so excited because we could all be doing that. People who work at Wikipedia, like there’s one of the great OERs of all time, right? Wikipedia is the mother of OERs. You know, having your students do their coursework in conjunction with Wikipedia, where they’re adding links to Wikipedia, adding citations, improving Wikipedia articles, maybe even writing new articles. That’s challenging but it’s great, you know, if you can get your students up to that level of Wikipedia proficiency. So yeah, all of these things fall under the rubric of non-disposable assignments.

– One thing I was thinking of as you were talking about the different tools and technologies, and even your example of Wikipedia, is that in some ways non-disposable has a sense of permanence, which I think is empowering. But I imagine also as you have such rich expertise in online teaching technologies, do you have to have like digital literacy conversations with students about, you know, what does it mean to have your name on a Wikipedia article? Or what does it mean to have this kind of like permanent presence? Of course you can click and delete things, but to establish that kind of awareness with them.

– Oh, and it’s an easy thing to do just right at the beginning of class, you know, to look at the tools and spaces that you’re asking them to participate in, and figuring out, how can you make it their choice? You know, so they’re choosing which tools in which spaces, right? Unlike the LMS where we just herd everybody in there willy-nilly. You know, they need to make informed choices, you need to give them the information they need about the tools, about the spaces, and make sure they understand exactly that question of their presence and identity in those spaces. And so, a lot of my students chose pseudonymous identities when they were publishing online, which was great. I think that’s a fantastic approach. So all my students blogged, and those blogs were very ephemeral, but they did persist for the duration of a whole semester. You know, so when students started the blog at the beginning of the semester, they wanted to think about put my name on it or not.

Since I taught fully online, they had the opportunity to participate in the class fully pseudonymously from start to finish. And so it would be so funny, sometimes at the end of the semester, I’d go to fill out the grade sheet that I had to do for the university, and I’d see the student’s real name and it’s like, oh, that wasn’t Rapunzel, you know, because I would interact with them through their pseudonym in the class. And then for more permanent things, like a website that’s gonna be accessible to others, a lot of students put their name on it with pride. You know, and so I think that’s really what you need to help students anticipate, you know, as these projects take shape over time, where is their final destination? What is their final purpose? And then you make informed choices about your identity, about your participation based on that knowledge. And so it is asking students to make choices, and that’s kind of a burden, an extra burden, and sometimes school just feels like one big burden. But those are the kinds of choices that they need to make in the future, in their professional lives and their personal lives. So I think it’s time well spent, and the conversations I had with students about those things were always really interesting conversations, because this is a choice you’re asking them to make that they recognize the importance and the relevance of that choice right away.

– Yeah, that makes perfect sense, and I can see again how these are kind of establishing success skills, like you just said, because, you know, these tools and technologies are gonna play a part in parts of their lives outside of the academic, right? Like you mentioned, professional, personal.

– Yeah, and can I just say, I’m gonna rant a little bit here. I’ve been so discouraged watching everybody rush to fill this AI vacuum. It’s like, oh, we have to teach students how to use AI. We have to make sure they’re prepared, and it’s like people, there was the internet for 25 years. What were you doing to make your students prepared to participate in the internet, to contribute to the internet, to be creators of online content? We dropped the ball on that abysmally, and we herded our students into the LMS where they don’t make choices, everything’s, the limits of what they can do were predefined and they’re very narrow limits in time and also in audience.

We missed that opportunity, and I would love it if people would take all the energy that they’re right now pouring into AI and step back and say, whoa, let’s look at the bigger picture, the internet and see if we can make up for some of the failures that resulted from our lack of engagement with the internet as a space that students can use as part of their education. That was a mistake. I know who I would blame for that mistake, but that’s not important now. What’s important now is that we figure out there’s still an internet out there, there’s still all kinds of great ways for students to claim spaces, to contribute to that open internet, like Wikipedia, other kinds of open educational resources, so now is the moment to do that. So I’ll still wave the OER banner instead of AI saying that’s where we can go where our students are gonna be learning as part of their activities and their contributions.

– Makes sense. So if an educator wanted to get started but had no familiarity beyond this conversation that you and I are having that they’re watching, I know you mentioned there are tons of resources online. Where would you suggest they start? Do they pick an assignment and try to make it alternative, or do they research first? Like what’s the best way to get into this?

– I think get into it by Googling. Like I said, if you google ‘unessay’ or Google ‘non-disposable assignments’, you’ll find so many ideas. And I’m a very digital person, but these don’t have to be digital things at all. So, plenty of people who are teaching in physical classrooms who interact with their students in physical spaces have done all kinds of great things too for assignments where maybe the goal is not that it’s gonna persist in a digital archive, but it can bring out all kinds of creativity and interaction in that physical space.

I participated in a workshop not long ago on how to make little zines, little physical magazines. It was just so inspiring ’cause there’s a whole tradition of zines going back decades, and it’s a very doable kind of thing for students to do, to share with each other through not just the papers that they write, but the zines that they make. So anyway, Google ‘non-disposable assignments’ or ‘unessay’, maybe add in your discipline and I guarantee you, you will get ideas that you can then take back to your students and brainstorm with them, ’cause involve your students in this process, ’cause this is part of the idea too is that we don’t have to have all the answers. We can create assignments and we can create grading standards for those assignments together with the students. And the more you involve them, the more successful it will be.

– Well, thank you. This has been such an interesting conversation, and I know it’s gonna be so valuable for the community. We always like to leave the last word to our expert, so I’ll let you have final say if you wanna share something with the community about this topic or anything else. You get the floor at the end here.

– Well, I’ll just say the internet is still a great place. You know, there’s platforms and problems and all kinds of woes out there on the internet, but if you can connect with other educators using the internet as a way to do that, you will be so happy. There’s still people out there blogging, putting up their websites, just trying to share what they’ve learned with you. So approach the internet with optimism and you will find great things there.

– Amazing. Well, thank you so much. It’s always wonderful to talk to you, Lauren. We appreciate your time and your help with empowering our community with new teaching strategies.

– I’m really glad to do it. Thank you.