Podcasts are quickly becoming a way that so many people, especially business people (my discipline), fit learning into their busy lives. I mentor Sanat Singhal, a 17 year old who is exploring his interest in entrepreneurship through his podcast 21st Century Visionary. We met in The Podcasting Workshop in April 2020. I was invited back to help support the July cohort, and now the January cohort, through their podcast concept creation process. I share this for two reasons:
- these Akimbo workshops inspire my thinking on Open Pedagogy, and
- I also think that my students could create an Open Educational Resources (OER) podcast to complement the new OpenStax Principles of Management OER textbook I am adopting this semester.
The Plan
Each of the 18 chapters is written by one or two different authors for a total of 16 authors altogether. I have no doubt most, if not all, of these authors would be willing to be interviewed regarding their chapter for this OER podcast. I would be looking for chapter authors to be interviewed via Zoom, hopefully live during class time (Mon/Wed 11:15am-12:00pm ET, Thurs 6:45-7:30pm or 8:15-9:00pm) or with a smaller group of interviewers at a time that is convenient to the author. If the chapter authors are unavailable, other interviewees could be invited to speak about the chapter.
My two sections would be divided into 5-6 person self-managed teams which would have responsibility for specific episode(s) and other organization (class) wide needs.
Why?
The future of business is creative collaboration of distributed teams. Management is experiential and those who learn to plan, organize, lead, and control both cognitively and affectively as part of a self-managed team, will be able to do so beyond the classroom.
I’ve already spent 4 semesters having students operate as self-managed teams that co-create the class experience. The Spring 2021 semester is the ideal time for my students to do this project because hopefully, this will be the last semester I must teach using the ‘live, remote online (LRON)’ format. This design may prove so successful that it becomes my new approach to an engaging LRON format with new seasons of the podcast each semester.
The software to record (Zoom) and edit podcasts (Audacity) is free. Making products for an authentic audience, as part of a truly self-managed team that leverages each other’s strengths pushes every intrinsic motivation button I’ve currently discovered. I believe there are more buttons to discover; I’m hopeful this project will help me find them.
Why OER, OEP & Ungrading?
To answer this question I point you to some Jesse Stommel resources that articulate the ‘why’ better than I can.
https://www.jessestommel.com/textbooks-oer-and-the-need-for-open-pedagogy/
https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/
I also plan to move towards ungrading in this course. I would be doing this even if I wasn’t teaching management but using self-assessment to determine a midterm and final grade based off ongoing feedback from me and their peers will prepare my students to think critically about employee evaluations whether they are the manager or the employee.
What’s Stopping Me?
I made a “non-negotiable courage” agreeement with myself a few years ago to do the things that scare me. This is scary to me. And yet so was my first innovative course design, and that worked. I have the know-how and support to make this happen; here are a few questions I’m currently sitting with:
- How to organize for mass collaboration?
- How to define roles?
- How to ensure the tech doesn’t frustrate learning?
- How to ensure connections are made regardless of chapter order?
What’s Stopping You?
If you are interested in this approach, or want to consider podcasting with your students, you check out the resources I’ve started to collect here, feel free to copy anything from my syllabus and reach out with any questions.
Credit
OpenStax Principles of Management is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) license