Authors: Michelle Harrison, Thompson Rivers University Michael Paskevicius, University of Victoria Acknowledgement: Dr. Irwin DeVries, Dr. Tannis Morgan, and Tom Woodward were major contributors to this project and part of the design team.  Introduction This design case outlines the development of an open resource, including a software application and reflection framework tool, that explores open and critical approaches to learning and instructional design. Our team included four educators who teach and have learning design backgrounds. We started this project as we were questioning how the shift to more open approaches to education requires a change in epistemological and pedagogical practice. We noted that contemporary resources and educational tools continued to be based on traditional, systematic, and static approaches to knowledge that could not meet our design needs and pedagogical intentions. For example, the traditional textbook format, even when offered as an open educational resource, can lack the interactivity, agency, and accessibility […]

Author: Dani Dilkes, Western University Collaborator: Dr. Courtney Casserly, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University In 2018, I slipped into the back of a lecture hall where a clinician was giving a lecture on Multiple Myeloma. I listened to a factual and detailed presentation of what Multiple Myeloma is (a blood cancer), how it presents, how it is treated, and the prognosis of patients. The presentation was full of statistics and diagrams of mutated cells. The lecturer was familiar to me, as she was one of my mother’s team of doctors, a very knowledgeable and not unkind physician.  But what she missed on that day was the visceral experience of finding out that a loved one has a disease that you had never heard of before and didn’t fully understand. The constant cycling between hope and hopeless of a barrage of experimental treatments. The exhaustion of living between […]

Author: Brian Lorraine, Simon Fraser University  What are the questions we might not be thinking to ask? In terms of cultural dimensions of ethics in design, many important considerations may be ‘hiding in plain sight’. As I continue to reflect on the issue of design ethics in relation to the handling of Indigenous Knowledge in recorded course media, the anxious feeling of uncertainty around what sort of protocol should be followed still persists. Moore (2021) explains that in the case of design situations, how design problems are framed correlates to the nature of possible solutions identified, and “thus directly impacts what problems designers address—or not” (para. 6). The struggle, though, in the context of higher education institutions fraught with inherent colonial structures and mindsets, is that we may not be well equipped to effectively problematize design ethics with regard to Indigenous cultural knowledges and practices. For example, dimensions of ethics […]