Join Dylan Barth, Vice President of Innovation and Programs at the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), as he sits down with Kim Grewe, a longtime OLC workshop facilitator and advocate for Open Educational Resources (OER).

In this episode of our Facilitator Spotlight Series, Kim shares her inspiring journey as an educator, her passion for OER, and best practices for faculty looking to implement open pedagogy in their classrooms. She also discusses the future of OER, the role of AI in education, and why collaboration is key to success.

Are you an educator interested in OER? Learn from Kim’s insights and discover how OER can enhance student engagement, increase access, and empower faculty.

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Interview Transcript
I’m Dylan Barth, Vice President of Innovation and Programs at the OLC, and I have the great privilege to chat with Kim Grewe, who we are highlighting this month as part of our Facilitator Spotlight Series.

Kim has been leading workshops for the Center of Professional Learning for about 10 years, and so we’re here to learn a little bit more about her and her thoughts about education. So, welcome, Kim.

Dylan: What is your origin story? How did you get to where you’re at in your career?

Kim: Well, hello, Dylan, thank you for having me.

Again, I’m honored and thrilled to be here and just delighted that you chose me to spotlight. I am a lifelong educator. I knew I wanted to be an English teacher since I was in seventh grade, so I’m one of the lucky ones.

I knew my purpose early on, and that’s what I’ve pursued in one way or another. I’ve taken what I like to term a spaghetti pathway, and I’m going to take that term from Dr. Michelle Weiss, who is also a lifelong learning advocate.

And like many of us, probably, but been not even circuitous. It’s been such a messy and odd path. But I’ve done everything from teaching middle school English and high school English to coaching basketball and volleyball, being an athletic director, driving the bus, teaching at community college at night, doing dual enrollment English courses, getting into online learning when it became a thing, becoming an instructional technologist while I was an English professor.

And then I ended up basically where I’ve been the last about 10 years, the longest I’ve ever been anywhere with Northern Virginia Community College as an instructional designer. And that’s when I got connected with the OLC. So, I’m a lifelong lover of learning.

And that’s what kind of brought me here.

Dylan: Oh, that’s wonderful. It sounds like you’ve had a number of great experiences in a number of different areas at all levels, so many different levels.

Dylan: What workshops do you typically facilitate for OLC? And what do you like about leading them?

Kim: Well, I do the OER Part 1, Exploring Open Educational Resources, and OER Part 2, Implementing Open Educational Resources.

And I’ve been doing those almost a decade, and I love those workshops. And the main thing I love about them, besides spreading the good word about what are OER and how they can help increase student access and help personalize and customize course materials and empower faculty, besides that, it’s the thrill of working with the different faculty who sign up for these professional development learning workshops, I always tell them, and it’s authentic, I am sure I learn as much as they do. And even if people are new to OER, they’re professionals in the field, and they bring just rich experiences.

So that’s my joy, is to interact and get to meet new people and learn from them in those workshops.

Dylan: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Thanks for sharing that. And, I would say that you’re not alone in, you say you love the workshop, and we have such great rating and response from this series of workshops as well.

So thank you for being a wonderful facilitator.

I want to jump into kind of more, a little bit more the outside of the workshops and ask some questions about OER more generally.

This question is, what is one particularly effective practice related to OER that you’d like to share?

Kim: I think one of the greatest practices I can share is collaboration, besides giving faculty the information, the tools, and the support they need.

I think it’s important that we actually sit together and get to work together. So we either do sprints or we do remix workshops, and we actually have faculty come together, and we all work together on something that they’re actually going to be using and implementing. And we even try to use that approach in the workshops for the OLC because people are busy.
And so we always sort of want the work to be something that is manageable.

And I really feel like at the center of open pedagogy is that idea of collaboration anyway. And so I think having people, providing opportunities for them to be together to get the work done, I think, is one of the most important things.

Dylan: So if you are a faculty member or instructor watching this, go find someone else who’s doing similar work or an instructional designer who you can collaborate with. If you’re an instructional designer working closely with faculty to be able to bring these initiatives to light.

Well, how about what advice do you have for someone new to using OER and to open pedagogy?

Outside of the example.

Kim: I mean, we just said let’s seek out others who are doing the work because a lot of times there are people doing the work and we might not even know about it.

So let’s seek those people out. But the other thing I often recommend is let’s draw on the good work that’s already been done.

You know, sometimes when people hear about open educational resources, they think, well, maybe I just have to write my own.

And, you know, that might be true in some instances, but so many people are doing such good work. And it’s, me, a smarter way to start small, to find something already created and adopt that and adapt that for your needs. And then once you start getting your feet wet that way, then you can dive in deeper.

And the second piece of advice I think is just critical is talk with your students as you’re doing it, as you’re working through it, bring the students in as part of the process, because again, that’s part of open pedagogy as well, centering students more, including them as part of the process, giving them agency choices and some power to make some decisions around the curriculum. So start small and talk to your students. Bring your students in right away would be my advice to those getting started.

Dylan: That’s great advice. I love that. Bring in your students.

I think that’s something we continue to hear at the OLC about from so many faculty instructors, IDs about that, how important it is to have that student voice and to get them invested, right, I think is what you’re talking about as well.

One last question for you, Kim. How do you see OER and open pedagogy evolving in the next few years?

Kim: Well, I think the answer might be kind of obvious to some. I don’t know.

But I think AI is going to play a greater role, of course. I mean, David Wiley has already talked about, you know, Gen AI is the new OER, basically.

Now, there are other people who are thoughtfully, and there are big leaders in the field who are pushing back against that, like Amy Hofer with Open Oregon. But I really feel like the AI is going to have an impact in a couple of ways. First, it’s potentially got a lot of capability to create those customized, personalized learning materials.

Once you learn how to sort of interact with it, get the most out of it, it can be really helpful in doing things like, you know, aligning objectives, creating multiple choice quizzes, different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, making rubrics, you know, all these sorts of things that are part of creating good OER. We can draw on AI to help us with.

And then the other thing about it, though, when it comes to open pedagogy, and this is the area that I hope we see more, we want to learn more about how to collaborate and how not to sort of isolate with the AI, but to use it as a tool and we still have that human collaboration. I feel like that piece is important and we need to find a way to kind of bridge that gap between a lot of work kind of being done in silos anyway, and then even more so with AI, it seems, and have more human collaboration. So I feel like AI is going to change, you know, how we do things for sure.

And hopefully centering students more is going to continue to be part of the movement, because I feel like that’s the area where we really need to move towards.

Dylan: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for that. Really appreciate in kind of a in a field or an area right now, it seems like there’s a lot of ambivalence around generative AI, and so it’s really good to see a very positive, fresh perspective about how that might affect students, empower their success.

So that’s wonderful.

Well, I just want to say thank you so much, Kim, for being a fantastic facilitator and for sitting here with me today. It’s really great to have you as part of our community and keep up the good work.

Kim: Thank you so much, Dylan. I’m just delighted to be here and thanks for having me.