John O. Harney: N.E.’s changing ethnic demographics; shrinking police forces; honorary degrees and culture wars

1. Northwest Vermont 2. Northeast Kingdom 3. Central Vermont 4. Southern Vermont 5. Great North Woods Region 6. White Mountains 7. Lakes Region 8. Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee Region 9. Seacoast Region 10. Merrimack River Valley 11. Monadnock Region 12. North Woods 13. Maine Highlands 14. Acadia/Down East 15. Mid-Coast/Penobscot Bay 16. South Coast 17. Mountain and Lakes Region 18. Kennebec Valley 19. North Shore 20. Metro Boston 21. South Shore 22. Cape Cod and Islands 23. South Coast 24. Southeastern Massachusetts 25. Blackstone River Valley 26. Metrowest/Greater Boston 27. Central Massachusetts 28. Pioneer Valley 29. The Berkshires 30. South Country 31. East Bay and Newport 32. Quiet Corner 33. Greater Hartford 34. Central Naugatuck Valley 35. Northwest Hills 36. Southeastern Connecticut/Greater New London 37. Western Connecticut 38. Connecticut Shoreline

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Population studies. The U.S. Census Bureau released new population counts to use in “redistricting” congressional and state legisla­tive districts. Delayed by the pandemic, the counts came close to the legal deadlines for redistricting in some states, raising concerns about whether there would be enough time for public input.

The U.S. population grew 7.4% in 2010-2020, the slowest growth since the 1930s, according to the bureau. The national growth of about 23 million people occurred entirely of people who identified as Hispanic, Asian, Black or more than one race.

The Associated Press reported:

• The population under age 18 dropped from 74.2 million in 2010 to 73.1 million in 2020.

• The Asian population increased by one-third over the decade, to stand at 24 million, while the Hispanic population grew by almost a quarter, to top 62 million.

• White people made up their smallest-ever share of the U.S. population, dropping from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020. The number of non-Hispanic white people dropped to 191 million in 2020.

• The number of people identifying as “two or more races” soared from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020, accounting for about 10% of the U.S. population.

A few New England snippets

Maine remains the nation’s oldest and whitest state, even though it saw a 64% increase in the number of Blacks from 2010 to 2020, as well as large increases in the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders.

Connecticut’s population crawled up 0.9% over the decade from 2010 to 2020 to 3,605,944 residents. The number of residents who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) increased from 29% of the population in 2010 to 37% in 2020. Connecticut’s number of congressional seats won’t change, but district borders will.

The total population of the only city on Boston’s South Shore, Quincy, Mass., topped 100,000 (at 101,636), as its Asian population grew to represent nearly 31% of all residents. Further south, the city of Brockton’s population increased by nearly 13% as the white population dropped by 29%, and the Black population increased by 26%.

Amazon jungle. Amazon last week announced it will pay full college tuition for its 750,000 U.S. hourly employees, as well as the cost of earning high school diplomas, GEDs, English as a Second Language (ESL) and other certifications. While collecting praise for its educational goodwill, stories of dire conditions in the e-commerce giant’s workplace also triggered a new California law that would ban all warehouses from imposing penalties for “time off-task” (which reportedly discouraged workers from using the bathroom) and prohibit retaliation against workers who complain.

Police shrink. Police forces in New England have recently felt new recruitment and retention pressures. In August 2021, The Providence Journal ran a piece headlined “Promises made, promises delivered? A look at reforms to New England police departments.” GoLocal reported that month that Providence policing staff levels stood at 403, down from 500 or so in the 1980s under then-Mayor David Cicilline. The number of officers employed by Maine’s city and town police departments and county sheriffs’ offices shrank by nearly 6% between 2015 and 2020, according to the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. Reporter Lia Russell of the Bangor Daily News noted, “It’s also a challenge that police in Maine are far from alone in facing, especially following a year during which police practices across the nation were called into question following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin.” The Burlington, Vt., City Council in August defeated efforts to reverse a steep cut in city police ranks. The police department currently has 75 sworn officers, down from 90 in June 2020. A survey by the police officers’ union found that roughly half of Burlington cops were actively seeking employment elsewhere.

Honor roll. Honorary degrees are becoming something of a frontline in the culture wars. Springfield College alum­nus Donald Brown, who recently coauthored a piece for NEJHE, tells of his alma mater revoking the honorary master of physical education degree it had bestowed on U.S. Olympic Committee Chair Avery Brundage in 1940. In 1968, Brundage pressured the U.S. to take action against two Olympic athletes who gave the Black Power salute after finishing first and second in the 200 meters. That event was only the tip of the iceberg. Brundage had a history of anti-semitism, sexism and racism. Springfield President Mary-Beth Cooper met with the trustees and others and decided to take back the honor. Meanwhile, the University of Rhode Island has been tying itself in knots over the honorary degree it bestowed on Michael Flynn in 2014, before he was appointed Trump’s national security adviser and accused of sedition.

Refugees. After the U.S. ended its longest war (so far) in Afghanistan and the capital of Kabul fell, the question arose of where Afghan refugees would resettle. New England cities, including Worcester, Providence and New Haven, are among those that have readied plans to welcome Afghan refugees. In higher education, Goddard College President Dan Hocoy said it was a “no-brainer” to offer to house Afghan refugees at its Plainfield, Vt., campus for at least two months this upcoming fall. Back in 2004, NEJHE (then Connection) featured an interview with Roger Williams University President Roy J. Nirschel, who died in 2018, and his former wife Paula Nirschel on the university’s role in its community as well as their pioneering initiative to educate Afghan women.

Sunshine state. Before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took his most recent stand against fighting COVID, he displayed a narrow-mindedness that seems to always be in fashion. As Inside Higher Ed reported, after expressing concerns about faculty members “indoctrinating” students, DeSantis signed a law requiring that public institutions survey students­, faculty and staff members about their viewpoint diversity and sense of intellectual freedom. The Miami Herald reported that DeSantis and state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, the original bill’s Republican sponsor, suggested that the results could inform budget cuts at some institutions. Faculty members have opposed the bill, which also allows stude­­­­­­nts to record their professors teaching in order to file free speech complaints against them.

New colleges in a time of contraction. The nonprofit Norwalk (Conn.) Conservatory of the Arts announced plans to open a new performing-arts college and welcome its first class in August 2022. It’s unusual news amid the stream of college mergers and closures only widened by the pandemic. Among the challenges, many of the faculty members don’t have master of fine arts degrees that accrediting agencies require and, without accreditation, the college’s students won’t be eligible for federal financial aid or Pell Grants.

The Conservatory says the college will consolidate a traditional four-year undergraduate program into two years of intense training and a two-year graduate program into one year. Meanwhile, up the coast, the (Fall River, Mass.) Herald News reports that Denmark-based Maersk Training and Bristol Community College will work together to turn an old seafood packaging plant in New Bedford, Mass., into a National Offshore Wind Institute training facility to train offshore wind workers, complete with classrooms and a deepwater pool to train and recertify workers. (NEJHE has reported on the need to train talent for the burgeoning industry and the coastal economy’s special role in New England.)

Other higher-ed institutions are shapeshifting. After months of discussions and lawsuits, Northeastern University and Mills College reached agreement to establish Mills College at Northeastern University. Founded in 1852, Mills is renowned for its pre-eminence in women’s leadership, access, equity and social justice. Also, billionaire investor Gerald Chan and his family’s Morningside Foundation gave $175 million to the University of Massachusetts Medical School, which will be renamed the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. That’s the largest-ever gift to the UMass system.

Land deals. I was recently struck by a report titled We Need to Focus on the Damn Land: Land Grant Universities and Indigenous Nations in the Northeast. The report was born of a partnership between Smith College students and the nonprofit Farm to Institution New England (FINE) to look at how land grant universities view their historic relationships with local Indigenous tribes and how food can play a role in repairing those relationships. It grabbed my attention, partly because NEJHE has published some interesting stories about Native Americans and New England higher education. (See Native Tribal Scholars: Building an Academic Community and A Different Path Forward, both by J. Cedric Woods and The Dark Ages of Education and a New Hope, by Donna Loring.) And partly because two NEBHE Faculty Diversity Fellows, professors Tatiana M.F. Cruz of Simmons University and Kamille Gentles-Peart of Roger Williams University, are spearheading a fascinating Reparative Justice initiative. Among other things, Cruz and Gentles-Peart have had the courage to remind us that land grant universities in New England occupy the land of Indigenous communities. The Smith-FINE work offered sensible recommendations: Financially support Native and Indigenous faculty, activists, programs on campuses and beyond; offer free tuition for Native American students; hire Indigenous people, and fund their research.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Todd McLeish: A proposal for 'freedom lawns'

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Few people put much thought into the soil beneath their feet, but Loren Byrne does. A professor at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, R.I., Byrne is an expert on urban soil ecology, and he worries that humans are changing the structural integrity of soils in urban environments and limiting the ability of plants and animals to live in and nourish the earth.

“Soil is easily overlooked and taken for granted because it’s everywhere,” he said. “We walk all over it and think of it as dirt that we can manipulate at our will. But the secret of soil is what’s happening with soil organisms and what’s happening with their interactions below ground that help regulate our earth’s ecosystems.”

Byrne contributed a chapter about urban soils to a report, State of Knowledge of Soil Biodiversity, issued last year by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. He discussed how the ecology of the soil changes as it is compacted during construction, paved over, chemically treated for lawns, and dug up and carried away.

“The main takeaway is that urbanization can potentially harm biodiversity, but our biggest current threat is ignorance,” he said. “We don’t understand enough about soil biodiversity in urban environments, so we may not be able to manage it in ways to provide the benefits that are possible.”

Soil is the foundation for terrestrial life, according to Byrne. It’s the medium in which plants are grown and it regulates the nitrogen cycle, sequesters carbon, and manages the flow of water. He said soils are fascinating because they contain the full range of life, from single-celled bacteria and fungi to animals of all varieties.

“If you’re patient enough to get down on your hands and knees and pull up some soil, you’ll see mites, springtails, isopods, millipedes, centipedes, spiders, ants, beetles,” Byrne said. “Some of them have negative popular connotations, but ecologically, if we can see them as having value, then that will help us maintain more sustainable landscapes.

“Changing our perspectives of what these organisms are doing in the ecosystem is important. They perform beneficial functions, like decomposition. I tell my students that if it wasn’t for this whole suite of biodiversity in our soils, we’d literally be up to our necks in dead stuff.”

Although it may seem counterintuitive, Byrne said urban soils contain the full range of biodiversity that is found in natural soils, and some research shows that they contain more organisms and a greater diversity than agricultural soils.

“A lot of urban habitat types, like lawns and little forest patches, are perennial, so they don’t face the same level of annual disturbance as agricultural fields,” he said. “And they have more organic matter in them, so that allows the food web to become more complex. Urban soils are home to a lot of organisms.”

He noted, however, that there is also a massive volume of degraded soil in urban areas that is compacted, trampled, over-fertilized, and removed and replaced with lower quality soil.

“It’s a very interesting dichotomy,” Byrne said. “There are some high-quality soils and other locations that have been severely negatively impacted where we would want to somehow improve them.”

How to improve degraded soils is the topic of Byrne’s latest research. Decompacting the soil and remediating pollution are important steps, but the key is the addition of organic matter.

“There’s been a wide diversity of organic matter sources that have been investigated, from basic garden compost to sewage sludge to bio-char, which is a burned organic matter that, when added to soil, provides good surfaces for microbes to live on,” he said. “But you have to be very careful about what you’re using and in what contexts and the source, because not all organic matter is the same.

“A lot of research has shown that adding organic matter will help remediate the soils in various ways. Organic matter holds onto water, so it helps with water issues, for instance. But in locations that are already prone to water-logging, adding organic matter could be a bad thing. So context matters. You need to be familiar with site specific issues to come up with a good management plan.”

Byrne focuses a great deal of his research attention on lawns, which he calls a “human-created ecosystem.” While he noted that a lawn provides a nice place for a picnic and is better than pavement, he said installing a lawn is the least biodiverse way of improving urban landscapes.

“The goal with a lawn is often one grass species that’s bright green and isn’t growing or reproducing, which is the exact opposite of what life wants to do,” he said. “In the grand scheme of all life, a place becomes more diverse over time, it grows and reproduces, and humans are trying to stop all of that in a lawn.

“The problem isn’t so much the lawn itself as the monoculture, pesticide-managed lawn. A lot of what ecologists advocate is a more biodiverse lawn where we let the so-called weeds grow and let the grass grow a little taller. That’s good for the soil ecosystem because a higher variety of plants and no chemical pesticides will allow more soil organisms to thrive.”

To create a more sustainable urban landscape, Byrne advocates for what some have called “freedom lawns” — a mowed lawn that maintains a high diversity of grasses and weeds and good soils.

“If we can convince people that it’s more patriotic to shift to freedom lawns, it will be more sustainable,” he said. “And if we can shrink the area of lawn by creating more biodiverse habitat through shrubs and wildflowers, that’s another step toward sustainability and biodiversity.”

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

How fares 'Open Education' in Rhode Island?

— Photo by Johannes Jansson

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In the following Q&A, Fellow for Open Education Lindsey Gumb takes the pulse of Open Education in Rhode Island with two key leaders in the field: Dragan Gill, who is a Rhode Island College reference librarian and co-chair of the Rhode Island Open Textbook Initiative, and Daniela Fairchild, who is director of the Rhode Island Office of Innovation.

In September 2016, Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo announced her Open Textbook Initiative, challenging the state’s postsecondary institutions to save Rhode Island students $5 million over five years in textbook costs using “open” textbooks instead of expensive, commercial textbooks. The Rhode Island Office of Innovation (InnovateRI) has helped lead the initiative through its partnership with the Adams Library at Rhode Island College (RIC) and steering committee that includes a librarian from each of the state’s postsecondary institutions. Now a little over four years into the initiative we ask Dragan Gill and Daniela Fairchild to share their thoughts on the status of the challenge, lessons learned and their hopes for the future use of open educational resources (OER) in Rhode Island.

Gumb: Interestingly, Rhode Island’s Open Textbook Initiative isn’t mandated by any specific legislation. In what ways has this made the challenge easier … or more difficult?

Gill: Without legislation, we have been able to develop individualized methods of reaching a shared goal within the scope of the governor’s challenge. Each institution has been able to find a meaningful way to incorporate open textbooks and OER in their curricula, while developing strategies that fit within the scope of the institution’s mission and goals, resources and support they have for this work. On the other hand, having funding tied to well-crafted legislation would better support the staffing, professional development and faculty time needed to further the initiative. Having had time to understand the needs of Rhode Island institutions and to review legislation from other states, I believe we now could work with the governor to draft legislation that supports and guides OER efforts in a pragmatic way for our state.

Fairchild: Legislation can be a blessing and a curse. While it adds gravity and force to an initiative, it also can lead to prescription and a compliance-focus. Sometimes, those doing the work end up spending more time preparing for the next mandated legislative report and less time thinking strategically and creatively about the best way to solve for the need or problem identified through legislation. As one of my policy-wonk colleagues once said, legislation is a sledgehammer. There are times when that is necessary; there are times when one would be better served by a scalpel. For this initiative specifically, not having associated legislation has allowed for campus-specific efforts and has allowed a true fostering of a “coalition of the willing.” It has let us experiment and think creatively for each institution’s context. That said, it has meant that the work has truly stayed a coalition of the willing—those who have understood the need have continued to engage. Those who might need a sledgehammer-like prod have not. To Dragan’s point above, now that we are four years into the work, and have a more intricate understanding of the needed guidance, resources and supports for our collective institutions—as well as a sense of lofty, yet realistic goals—it might be time to revisit the conversation.

Gumb: This challenge tracks student savings data from using open textbooks in place of commercial textbooks, but we know that OER does so much more than save students money. How is the Rhode Island Open Textbook Initiative Steering Committee addressing these other areas like equity and pedagogy?

Gill: Unfortunately, we aren’t doing as much as we’d like. Because the challenge was issued as part of the governor’s broader educational attainment goals, equity has been a key component of outreach, but we haven’t found a way to measure this across the state yet. On my campus, Rhode Island College, I have been working on collecting faculty OER and open textbook adoption data in our student information system for several reasons, including better analyzing the impact OER and open textbooks are having on student retention and completion. We are also currently working on creating a way to collect qualitative data about OER-enabled pedagogy practices across the state. We want this data collection to be both easy for faculty to use, but also provide meaningful information for the steering committee. We also want to showcase it. Lastly, this will provide a more complete picture of faculty engagement with openly licensed materials than our data collection thus far, which, focusing on adoption, hasn’t included more creative work or pedagogical practices.

Fairchild: We’ve seen this manifest in different ways at different institutions. Some of our steering committee members, knowing that textbook cost doesn’t resonate with their faculty as loudly as other rationale for open, have focused their “why” communication around open pedagogy, equity and even academic freedom. And, while Dragan is right that there is more to do on this front—and that data tracking around these pieces becomes a bit trickier—what we have seen is the Open Textbook Initiative serve as a launchpad for steering committee members to have those conversations. “Everyone! Listen up! The state has this challenge to save students money. Now that I have your attention, let me show you all the other reasons why open matters—and all the ways open can complement and support your own academic and pedagogical goals.”

Gumb: What has been the Steering Committee’s biggest challenge to date, and how are you working through it?

Gill: As a committee of librarians, we all have to balance our work on the initiative with the responsibilities we were hired for. To respect that this is different for each library, we have set very few hard deadlines and work with each campus to create their own goals towards supporting Open Education for the semester. But to leverage the strengths of the group, we use retreats to foster collaboration among committee members working on similar tasks or with members who have had successes in a problem area for others. Additionally, we have had some turnover in committee membership, which has brought in fresh ideas, but has made sustaining work and processes harder. In addition to having a call or meeting with each new member, we share outreach and training materials in a collection for all committee members to adapt and use.

Fairchild: I agree with Dragan … the natural cadence of steering committee turnover and the lack of dedicated time to support the work has been challenging, but we’ve been working through these things. And continuing to think through ways we can automate processes so they can endure even through steering-committee-member shifts. Longevity and sustainability are relevant issues too. Across campuses, we have leveraged the challenge to elevate open textbooks, but also open more broadly—and we’ve seen a lot of interest and excitement from faculty who are “early adopters” of open textbooks. As we continue, we will need to start connecting to the “early adopter” and “late adopter” faculty; this will require different communications tactics and different supports. We have begun this strategizing through the twice-annual steering committee retreats. And we plan to use the culmination of our current challenge phase to launch phase 2 and reinvigorate that engagement.

Gumb: Public and private institutions often embrace OER in different ways. How has your Steering Committee, which is composed of both, navigated these differences together?

Gill: By focusing on the value of open education, we are able to build our individual efforts based on a shared core understanding. For some campuses, equity and access are more important; for others, there’s more room to discuss creative pedagogy. But ultimately, all of us are working toward offering the best education to our students and, by working with a range of campus partners, we’re able to address both visions at each institution. One thing I’ve found interesting is how the conversation on each campus shifts. When the challenge began, equity and access resonated on my campus. But in sustaining our work, we’ve added exploring OER-enabled pedagogy. Conversely, I know my colleagues at Roger Williams University began their work heavily focused on faculty creation of OER, but in response to results from a student survey have been including more information about the impact of textbook costs on their students in their outreach efforts.

Unfortunately, there have also been inequities. Rhode Island’s Office of Postsecondary Council has funded the state’s three public institutions’ membership in the Open Education Network (OEN), an active community of higher education leaders who work together to build sustainable open education programs. But as the governing body for the public institutions, it cannot do the same for our private partners. Two private institutions have also advocated for funding and joined the OEN, but if we were to start over, having the funding for each institution to join the OEN or SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) would be high in my priorities.

Gumb: What makes you most proud when you look back on the past four years of this challenge?

Gill: In addition to being on track to meet our goal, I am most proud of our ability to quickly find and work with partners. National organizations like OEN, SPARC and Student PIRGs have all been collaborators since the start, but locally, we have also worked with: the Governor’s Commission on Disabilities for a training session and guidance on accessibility; Providence Public Library’s Tableau User Group, through the Data for Good Initiative, to visualize our data; the Rhode Island Teaching and Learning Consortium (RITL) to share our work and see how they can better help engage faculty; and the Office of Library and Information Services to co-sponsor a two-day “Copyright Bootcamp” for the steering committee and librarians across the state. In return, we provided an overview of OER and Open Access for public libraries through OLIS’s professional development workshop series, provided the first large dataset to the Tableau User Group, opened the Copyright Bootcamp to all librarians in the state, and with the background knowledge to do so, are advocates for more accessible teaching and learning materials on our campuses. This showcases the best of librarianship’s ability to bring experts and networks together to benefit all.

Fairchild: Hear, Hear! Now, my much more bureaucratic answer. I’m proud of co-creating something that has legs. In government (as with all systems and large institutions), change is hard. Status quo processes (whether explicit or not) are difficult to change. Initiatives launched by one administration are rarely kept alive through subsequent administrations—either because they are overtly reversed, or because they just fade after losing their executive branch champion. The Open Textbook Initiative has been messy and imperfect, but it has diffuse champions, including those who officially represent our work through the steering committee most notably, but also the faculty our committee members have worked with and the many partners. I think a lot about how to ensure the “stickiness” of innovation in public systems. And I am proud of how so many partners and people have come together to give this work one of the best shots at organic stickiness that I’ve seen.

Gumb: What’s one piece of advice you’d like to share with legislators in the Northeast who might be considering issuing an open textbook challenge such as Rhode Island’s?

Gill: Plan ahead! Scan each institution for existing campus leaders and develop your steering committee or leadership before you announce the challenge. Define your goals and what measures you’ll use to assess progress before you start, but leave room for new ideas.

Fairchild: Just one? If you will permit me, here are three (they are short!) 1) Allow for creativity: Don’t regulate or regiment Open work so much that it stifles new thinking or doesn’t allow for those who you have tasked with the work to actually do the work—especially as the landscape and knowledge base around this is continuously maturing; 2) Foster collaboration: This shouldn’t just be a public institution thing, or something run through one school (even your flagship!), so be mindful of how you’re writing legislation to allow all institutions to see themselves as productive partners and supporters of your goals; 3) You don’t need money, necessarily (we did this without very much at all), but consider how and when targeted, smart investment can help. Dragan mentioned consortia memberships above: Those carry a small-dollar price tag and go a long way with securing buy-in at the outset (it shows that you are investing in the people who are going to make this happen for you) and that you care about the sustainability of this work. We additionally supported faculty with micro-grants to review and adopt open textbooks—which was important at the outset to show that leadership cared about this, but also is important later in any challenge for incentivizing the early or late adopters.

Leonard Yui: Pointers on setting up fresh air classrooms

The main quad of Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

The early science is showing that outdoor spaces are safer than indoor spaces for COVID-19. One research study from Japan found that COVID-19 transmission was 18.7 times greater indoors than outdoors. Another article from China found that, of 7,300 active COVID-19 cases, just one was connected to outdoor transmission.

Indoor spaces were never designed for social distancing and many are now depending on aging climate- controlling systems for viral filtration. These limitations are now muddied by politics, finance, marketing and logistics, raising the urgency to consider safer options.

Outdoor classrooms, too, have limitations compared to their indoor counterparts. What do we do about the sun, cold, heat, rain, etc., especially in New England? And where do we place the projectors, desks, seats, etc.?

It seems unthinkable to allow students and teachers to be exposed to the elements, but in 1907, Providence did just that by experimenting with the first “fresh-air” schools in the U.S. to combat the tuberculosis epidemic. Pioneered by two women doctors, the idea was to open an entire classroom wall to the frigid New England winters and bundle the students up with sleeping bag-like sacks with heated stones. It was so successful at reducing the health risks that it triggered a movement across the nation that lasted for nearly 50 years. Many advocates today, backed by recent science, are trying to bring these methods back.

The “fresh-air” classroom movement gives us a model for opening school while managing the elements with such devices as tents, umbrellas, heaters, jackets and so on. What may be lost by focusing overly on environmental and spatial adjustments is how pedagogy also can change landscapes. The proposed six-foot plots are more than just a measure of distance between two people, but a reflection of a complex non-classroom world wrestling with issues of health, race, wealth and climate inequities. The move outdoors is also a metaphor for adapting our beings to wild variables of society and to engage, first, those social and ecological issues that are near—that directly touch us.

Outdoor spaces can be mocked up like traditional classrooms, but they can offer more because of the COVID-19 restrictions. Safer outdoor places permit more opportunity for student interactions, larger spaces allow for groups to form personalized patterns, and the natural elements provides a dynamic background for interaction. Digital assets could supplement these offerings by having students pre-download slide presentations and use their phones as mini-projectors. By extending wifi signals, students could use Zoom as a video/audio connection, and digital tablets could serve as whiteboards.

On a more imaginative path, the lack of walls, roofs and boundaries mean the class is not confined to a location or simple desk patterns. The field of environmental education recommends using outdoor experiences as part of developing broad individual awareness of “how people and societies relate to each other and to natural systems.” A philosopher-colleague reminded me that the Ancient Greeks preferred talking and sharing their thoughts while going on long walks. Using the “Socratic method” with a walk-and-talk method might encourage students to make links between course topics and physical locations that have specific meaning for them. In the business world, professionals often do key “business” transactions in transitionary (between meetings) or relational (like dining) interactions.

None of this is a substitute for the traditional indoor classroom, but the current circumstances beckon more creative negotiation among places of safety, convenience and learning. Simply going outdoors is one step, but another more enticing and sustainable direction is to reshape the celebration of pastoral landscapes to places that connect us more deeply to the outside world, both figuratively and literally. These changes can be small, sporadic and scattered around many places, but in aggregate, and over time, they should make a valuable impact to safety and culture and promote a more animated learning place.

Leonard Yui is an associate professor of architecture at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, R.I.

Hit this link to see Professor Yui’s plan.

Lindsey Gumb: Pandemic means now is the time to widen access to learning materials

Open Access logo, originally designed by Public Library of Science

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BRISTOL, R.I.

Residential college and university campuses across New England abruptly closed their doors last month during the COVID-19 outbreak, and while some schools were in session and students were asked to vacate, many others were on spring break and students were asked not to return. In both situations, students found themselves at home or in new environments where they waited to see how their education would progress online and remotely.

Among many variables associated with the chaos and stress of the pandemic, a lack of direct access to learning materials like textbooks has arisen as one of the major roadblocks to student learning in the era of COVID-19.

As a nation, we have continued to observe a sharp rise in textbook prices since 1977, which leaves many students enrolled at postsecondary institutions, public or independent, unable to afford the required learning materials for their courses. As a Band-Aid solution, students often rely on borrowing a copy of the book or material from a classmate or the campus library—options that became obsolete overnight when campuses closed and we entered this new world of social distancing and online learning and course delivery. When access barriers to learning materials like textbooks exist, either financial or circumstantial (as in the case of COVID-19), we know that students’ grades and academic trajectory suffer, and ultimately institutional retention can take a hit. Having been laid off from part-time jobs, denied unemployment and mostly left out of the COVID-19 stimulus package, college students have enough stress and anxiety right now—the last thing they should be worrying about is not having access to their textbooks. Enter OER (Open Educational Resources).

Are those “solutions” really OER?

Textbook prices are only part of the access barrier issue. As teaching and learning shifts fully online during the COVID-19 pandemic, educators have been forced to more closely consider and analyze how copyright restrictions set by publishers may limit their students’ access to these essential learning materials. The last few weeks have shown more than ever why true OER have significant value in ensuring students have access to their learning materials, because they are free and have licenses that allow for reuse and retention without limitation. This is not the case with publisher content like textbooks or the many online learning “solutions” they offer in which access is only semester-long, not in perpetuity like OER. These materials, even if offered free of charge by the publisher right now during the pandemic, will inevitably shuffle back behind a paywall at the end of the semester, disproportionately harming students affected by conditions out of their control brought on by COVID-19 (displacement, illness, caretaking responsibilities, etc.) and who may need to retake courses and need access to the materials again.

OER providers such as Lumen Learning, Saylor Academy and the Open Course Library have full online courses ready to be adopted and easily integrated into learning management systems with very little effort needed by faculty members. The content is customizable. Students have immediate, free access, and unlike publisher content, access to the content won’t be lost when the semester ends.

OER, however, is not and cannot be the blanket solution for ensuring students have access to their learning materials during a time like this. In fact, we’ve heard stories from across the region of institutions handing out technology and hotspots to help address the digital inequities that exist for so many students. The Community College of Rhode Island awarded nearly 700 students grants to acquire computers or gain internet access with an additional 61 iPads distributed to students who requested them. OER are primarily digital resources, and students need an Internet connection to at least initially download the resource onto a device. While they are free, OER will still require other institutional support systems to make sure our students have everything they need to equitably participate in their remote learning.

Freeing information

This isn’t just about students’ access to textbooks. Also at issue is the current publishing industry’s suppression of access to information. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalition) defines Open Access (OA) as the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. OA ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.” The American Library Association and academic librarians have long been advocating for OA policies that remove barriers to scholarly, peer-reviewed research that are typically only accessible to those who have an active academic affiliation such as faculty, students, staff at colleges and universities. Institutions pay outrageous annual subscription fees on behalf of their community members to access this content, and those who have no affiliation pay a fee to access each article.

We’ve seen recently that many news organizations, such as The New York Times, Bloomberg News and The Atlantic, have removed the paywall on articles pertaining to COVID-19 so that the public has access to pertinent information that could potentially be lifesaving. OA fosters the same spirit except, instead of news, the information is peer-reviewed research, often generated by researchers through federal grant funding, aka “your tax dollars.” New research, particularly in the medical field, can have an immediate impact on public health. If that information is behind a paywall, only the privileged will have access to that potentially life-saving research. In January, a Washington Post article, Scientists are unraveling the Chinese coronavirus with unprecedented speed and openness, strongly illustrated this point. The genome sequence of the coronavirus was posted in an open access repository for genetic information and literally overnight, Andrew Mesecar, a professor of cancer structural biology at Purdue University, got a hold of it and started analyzing the DNA sequence. The immediate domino effect of having this information freely available has led to an international collaboration of scientists working together to aid in this public health crisis. Victoria Heath and Brigitte Vézina’s recent blog post for Creative Commons, Now is the time for Open Access Policies—here’s why, reminds us that “we must cooperate effectively to respond to an unprecedented global health emergency. The mantra “when we share, everyone wins” applies now more than ever.”

Robin DeRosa, director of the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth (N.H.) State University, notes “there is a link between public health and Open. The open sharing of research and data can help us quickly collaborate to find medical solutions. Open pedagogy can help us involve our students in our fields’ responses to the pandemic and remind us that the digital divide can complicate remote learning. And OER can remove barriers for students and faculty who need to shift to more ubiquitously available resources. Open is about public infrastructure more than it is a set of free textbooks.”

For more on the basics and supporting research of OER, check out Open Matters: A Brief Intro and see additional resources at the Open Education and Open Educational Resources page on NEBHE’s website.

Lindsey Gumb is an assistant professor and the scholarly communications librarian at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, where she has been leading OER adoption, revision and creation since 2016, focusing heavily on OER-enabled pedagogy collaborations with faculty. She co-chairs the Rhode Island Open Textbook Initiative Steering Committee and the is Fellow for Open Education at the New England Board of Higher Education. She was awarded a 2019-20 OER Research Fellowship to conduct research on undergraduate student awareness of copyright and fair use and open licensing as it pertains to their participation in OER-enabled pedagogy projects.

(Editor’s note: New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is a former member of The New England Board of Higher Education’s Editorial Advisory Board.)

Clock tower at Roger Williams University, in Mount Hope Bay

— Phtoto by Notyourbroom

Lindsey Gumb: Leveraging Open Education

Source: Florida Virtual Campus (2019). 2019 Florida Virtual Campus Student Textbook & Course Materials Survey. Tallahassee, Fla.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

(Editor’s note: the author’s last name was misspelled in the headline in earlier editions; we regret the error.)

BOSTON

Late last September, I joined NEBHE as its Open Education Fellow to help build upon the grassroots efforts that have been underway for years in the Northeast aiming to lessen the burden that textbook costs place on higher education students and their families. Like so many of my colleagues doing this work day in and day out, I’m passionate about breaking down this very real barrier to student learning and success. Many people still have only a vague sense of “Open Education,” so I’d like to share some thoughts on what it is and why it matters.

I recently attended my third Open Education Global Conference in November 2019 at Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy. As always, I returned home from the conference, feeling inspired after engaging with colleagues from around the globe who are doing amazing things to make education more equitable and attainable for students.

The final conference keynote delivered by Cheryl-Ann Hodgkinson-Williams of the University of Cape Town in South Africa defined “open education” as an umbrella term that encompasses the products, practices and communities associated with this work. The common term that represents the products of Open Education is OER (Open Educational Resources).

OER has been defined by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation as teaching, learning and research materials in any medium–digital or otherwise–that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. OER include textbooks, ancillary material like quiz banks, lesson plans and syllabi, as well as full-course modules, multimedia such as video, audio and photographs, and any other intellectual property that can be protected by copyright. In short, OER can be simplified to Free + Permissions: free for the student to access and permission to partake in most if not all of the “5R” activities of reuse, revise, remix, redistribute and retain the resource at hand in perpetuity.

A learning resource may be low-cost or even free to the student, but not qualify as OER. For example, library-licensed content like e-books and scholarly journal articles are “free” for the student to access for a limited time, but those materials are still copyrighted, and in fact, are paid for by budgets supported by student tuition. This means that those resources are not actually free, and when students graduate, they lose digital access to these resources due to strict publisher agreements between the library and the publisher that stipulate only currently enrolled students be granted access. Traditional publishing is a business, after all.

Inclusive access

Another concept often conflated with OER is the “inclusive access” model. This is sweeping through our college bookstores today. Like OER, inclusive access models aim to ensure that all students have access to their learning materials on day one of class with the cost rolled into their tuition. Unlike with true OER, however, students lose access to these materials after the semester ends because of those copyright restrictions set by the publisher. Inclusive access models also strip students of their right under the “first sale doctrine” that so many took advantage of before the age of digital textbooks. This doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, states that an individual who knowingly purchases a legal copy of a copyrighted work (in this case, a textbook) from the copyright holder receives the right to sell it in the secondhand market. Single-semester access (like through the inclusive access model) doesn’t serve students who are taking courses in a sequence, studying for the GRE, changing careers, retaking a class or simply trying to be informed citizens throughout their lives, notes Nicole Finkbeiner, director of OpenStax at Rice University. True OER, in contrast, allow students to retain their learning content in perpetuity, serving students and learners of all ages and stages.

I often get asked: “Are the costs of textbooks really such a burden?” Yes, they are. Let’s take a closer look at the current landscape in higher ed that has educators rallying around openly licensed resources and their pedagogical benefits.

A 2018 survey of Florida’s higher education institutions showed that 64% of students aren’t purchasing the required textbook for their courses because of the high cost, 43% are taking fewer courses and 36% are earning a poor grade just because they were unable to afford the book.

A former student of mine who was a veteran was forced to wait six weeks until his stipend for books was distributed. That’s six weeks’ worth of readings, assignments, quizzes and exams for which he did not have his textbook to reference and help him prepare. Many might argue, “Just put the books on a credit card and pay it off later!” This simply isn’t an option for so many students who don’t have access to a credit card or don’t wish to take on more student debt. It’s also unrealistic for educators to determine if an assigned textbook is “affordable” or not for their students. What’s affordable for one student may be a burden for another, and it’s impossible to study from a book you can’t afford.

Academic hardships aren’t the only repercussions of expensive textbooks for our students. Many are forced to make tough decisions like skipping meals, falling behind on rent and other cost-of-living bills in order to afford their course materials. The staggering gap between state funding and tuition is putting an increasing burden on students and their families to come up with money to fund their education. While faculty have little to no control over tuition costs, they can exercise their academic freedom and elect to use OER to help alleviate the high cost of textbooks, which helps all students.

Saving students money on textbooks is critical. No student should have to decide between basic human needs like buying groceries or medications, paying rent and utility bills, going to the doctor or buying their textbooks. But we cannot pat ourselves on the back and stop at OER. My colleague on NEBHE’s Open Education Advisory Committee, Robin DeRosa at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, put it best: “I don’t want to replace an expensive, static textbook with a free, static textbook.”  She’s right. OER is not the end all be all solution, and we can’t stop there.

Not just a textbook case

Moreover, the work being done in OER extends far beyond advocating for free textbooks. Scholars and practitioners work together to continuously re-examine how to improve and build upon the existing successes, challenges and opportunities that accompany the products, practices and communities of Open Education.

Open Education has the potential to provide so many more pathways for engaged learning and innovative pedagogies, increase opportunities to intentionally build in UDL (Universal Design for Learning) practices that normalize accessibility, empower our students as content creators and contributors to the Knowledge Commons, and leverage equitable access to high-quality learning resources for all students, particularly historically marginalized groups.

Robin DeRosa and her students co-edited and published the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature (with an open license, of course!) Students took on multiple tasks ranging from locating literature for inclusion, writing chapter introductions, and translating documents into modern English. While creating a free and openly licensed textbook for future students, DeRosa’s students also assumed the role of content creators and became published authors. The open license allows this student-created resource to be adapted and revised by other faculty and students, and interactive learning tools like Hypothes.is and H5P can be integrated into the textbook to remove that “static” element. (To view some other real examples of how educators are leveraging Open Education to encourage students take agency over their own learning experiences, I recommend checking out The Open Pedagogy Notebook, run by DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani, associate vice provost, open education at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia.)

Deploying the products of Open Education, we have the potential to level the playing field and grant all students equitable access to high-quality, free postsecondary instructional materials.

Lindsey Gumb is an assistant professor and the scholarly communications librarian at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, R.I., where she has been leading OER adoption, revision and creation since 2016, focusing heavily on OER-enabled pedagogy collaborations with faculty. She co-chairs the Rhode Island Open Textbook Initiative Steering Committee. She was awarded a 2019-20 OER Research Fellowship to conduct research on undergraduate student awareness of copyright and fair use and open licensing as it pertains to their participation in OER-enabled pedagogy projects.

Frank Carini: Microplastic pollution imperils corals

A recent study found that northern star coral polyps routinely consumed microplastics, shown above in blue, over brine shrimp eggs, shown in yellow.

— Photo by Rotjan Marine Ecology Lab at Boston University

From ecoRI News

Coral reefs form the most biodiverse habitats in the ocean, and their health is essential to the survival of thousands of other marine species. Unfortunately, these vital underwater ecosystems are beginning to get a taste for plastic.

A Roger Williams University professor, working with a team of researchers, recently published a study that found corals will choose to eat plastic over natural food sources. Unsurprisingly, it’s not good for their health, as it can lead to illness and death from pathogenic microbes attached to microscopic plastics. It also adds to the stress already being applied to coral reefs worldwide, by acidifying and warming oceans, other pollution sources, development, and harmful fishing practices, such as dynamiting and bleaching to capture fish for aquariums.

The project grew from concern about the 6,350 million to 245,000 million metric tons of plastic in the world’s oceans, and the 4.8 million to 12.7 million metric tons of new plastic that enter annually.

Photographs and news reports have documented dead whales and seabirds found with stomachs full of plastic and of sea turtles suffocating from plastic straws clogging their nostrils. At least two-thirds of the world’s fish stocks are suffering from plastic ingestion, according to estimates, as much of the planet’s plastic pollution eventually makes its way into the ocean.

Roger Williams University associate professor of marine biology Koty Sharp recently told ecoRI News that plastic pollution presents a growing problem for both water- and land-based ecosystems.

“It’s a huge problem,” she said. “There’s really nowhere left on the planet that hasn’t been touched by plastics. We’re finding plastics in every organism we study.”

As much as plastic proliferation is a problem, Sharp is even more concerned about the impacts of a changing climate and how humans are using natural resources. She pointed to the manmade damage being done to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef as an example.

“We need to quickly and dramatically decrease our dependency on plastics and fossil fuels,” the microbiologist said. “This isn’t a problem a few people can fix.”

The study that Sharp helped author was published recently in London’s science journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. It is the first of its kind to identify that corals inhabiting the East Coast of the United States are “consuming a staggering amount of microplastics,” which alters their feeding behavior and has the potential to deliver fatal pathogenic bacteria.

In their samples of northern star coral, collected off the coast of Jamestown, R.I., each coral polyp — about the size of a pin head — contained more than 100 particles of microplastics, according to the collaborative research team that included Sharp, Randi Rotjan, a research assistant professor of biology at Boston University, and colleagues from UMass Boston, Boston Children’s Hospital Division of Gastroenterology, Harvard Medical School, and the New England Aquarium.

Northern star coral can be found from Buzzards Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Since it can be found along the coast of most East Coast urban areas, Sharp said it is a “powerful tool” in helping to understand microplastic pollution.

Although this study is the first to document microplastics in wild corals, previous research had found that this same coral species consumed plastic in a laboratory setting. A 2018 study found plastic pollution can promote microbial colonization by pathogens implicated in outbreaks of disease in the ocean.

The study co-authored by Rotjan and Sharp produced similar lab results. When the researchers conducted experiments of feeding microbeads to the corals in their labs, Sharp said they found that the coral would more often choose the fossil-fuel derivative when given the choice between plastic and food of similar sizes and shapes, such as brine shrimp eggs.

In fact, every single polyp, or mouth, that was given the choice ate almost twice as many microbeads as brine shrimp eggs. After the polyps had filled their stomachs with plastic junk food with no nutritional value, they stopped eating the shrimp eggs altogether.

The study showed that bacteria can “ride in” on the microbeads. In the case of the bacteria they used in the lab — the intestinal bacterium E. coli — the microplastic-delivered bacteria killed the polyps that ingested them and their neighboring polyps within weeks, even though the polyps spit the microbeads out after about 48 hours. The E. coli bacterium persisted inside their digestive cavity.

“Research has shown that there are virtually no marine habitats that are untouched by plastics,” said Sharp, noting that research abounds demonstrating that nearly all ocean water contains plastic pollution. “Because of that, it’s critical that we understand the impact of plastics pollution. Microplastics pollution is a matter of global health — ecosystem health and human health.”

She noted that the problem of plastic pollution extends far beyond what can be seen. Plastics never fully degrade in seawater, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. Invisible to the naked eye, microplastics remain suspended in the water column, and this is what corals and other filter-feeding animals take in to get their food, she said.

The researchers had anticipated they would find microplastics in wild corals, but they were shocked by the volume present in their samples, according to Sharp.

Another invisible factor is the presence of microbes that hitch rides with plastics floating in the ocean, winding up in the stomachs of many creatures. These plastic-riding microbes are growing in number and upending the delicate balance of ecosystems.

Sharp said the problem is being made worse by human-induced climate change, which is helping bacteria to proliferate. She noted that microplastics in the ocean are coated with microbes.

“We know that plastic particles provide an enriching habitat for bacteria that are not usually in very high numbers in seawater,” Sharp said. “The microbial aspect of microplastics pollution is largely underexplored — it’s critical that we learn more about how plastics can affect the dynamics, abundance, and transport of microbes through our ecosystems and food webs. Alteration of microbiomes in our marine ecosystems by human-induced threats like plastics pollution and climate change holds great potential to impact marine environments on a global scale.”

To help mitigate the problem of plastic pollution, Sharp offered some tips:

Minimize single-use plastics. Use reusable bags and mugs. Buy groceries in bulk. Decline a straw if you don’t need one.

Take a day to count. How many times in one day do you use single-use plastics. What is unnecessary and what can be eliminated or replaced with more sustainable products?

Demand lower-impact packaging and support products with sustainable packaging.

Support and advocate for legislation and lawmakers that promote innovative solutions and alternatives for sustainable packaging.

“Given that plastics pollution is an ongoing threat co-occurring with climate change, it’s critical that we do more research to understand how they impact marine ecosystems together,” Sharp said, “and take immediate actions to minimize human impacts on the world’s oceans.”

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.