As I am approaching the final days of my coursework in the EdTech program, I have been reflecting on how this last course has changed me and how the overall program has informed my practice. A lot of the work done has been collaboratively done with Brittany Johnson as we are looking toward the completion of our joint project. The theme of this term has been “fresh eyes, fresh perspectives” where the richest sources of feedback have been from people from different backgrounds approaching our project from their field of expertise. We have been seeing our project in different lights and navigating through how to improve the theoretically and resource rich online space to cater to the needs of all.
In terms of coursework for this semester, Brittany and I have been working away at our final project, finishing up our chapter 2 literature review, tinkering with our chapter 3/open educational resource (OER), and seeking feedback from a multitude of people. At the start of the semester (January 29th, 2025), we met with Dr. Michael Paskevicius to get some new feedback on our writing and his immediate response was to acknowledge the ecological considerations of 3D printing, and the barriers for accessibility of people accessing our OER. This brought us to the lecture featuring Charlie Watson, the manager of accessible technology and data at the Center of Accessible Learning at UVic. Although he describes these phrases as “murky” when you consider they inform each other, Watson defines 2 different types of tech accommodations: adaptive tech and assistive tech (Watson, 2025, 7:32). Adaptive tech are the tools that cater to people with a specific disability, while adaptive tech are the tools that aren’t designed with a specific disability in mind, but rather designed to help many people. Adaptive and assistive tech can be physical or digital tools. From ergonomic mice and keyboards, to screen readers and text to speech, the goal is to remove barriers of entry for the task at hand. This got us thinking about how we might make our final paper and our OER more accessible to people interested in our topic. In terms of our paper, Brittany and I designed supporting graphics to help illustrate our thinking. We have also included descriptions of graphics within the document, and have alternative (ALT) text on the images themselves. In our OER, hosted by GitHub, we included a tab called “Considerations” where we include a rationale for the animated gifs helping learners who struggle with reading instructions, having ALT text on all of the still images, and acknowledging GitHub’s compatibility with text to speech software.
Example of the images included in our final document.
As our goal is to create an OER, listening to Cable Green, the director of open education at Creative Commons, speak about open education and creative commons licenses was essential to improving our understanding. Green mentions in his talk that OERs are more than online repositories, but also require the need to be freely available and give people the legal rights to at least adapt it (Green, 2005, 25:47). As Cable mentioned those 2 major criteria, Brittany and I went back to our GitHub to refresh ourselves on whether or not the creative commons license we put on our OER conforms to those stipulations. As of now, our OER has a “CC BY” license that “enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use” (Creative Commons, n.d.). As our GitHub is not locked behind barriers of membership/subscriptions/paywalls, and has the CC BY license on it, we are confident that our resource adheres to Green’s definition of an OER. He also presented David Wiley’s 5Rs of an OER which include retaining, reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing (Green, 2025, 27:25).
Looking at Wiley’s 5Rs, our OER currently satisfies 3 out of 5: retain, reuse, and redistribute. Teachers looking to use our 3D printing OER can access it with simply the URL, they can use the resource in the best way they see fit, and can share the URL with colleagues. At this time, Brittany and I have not enabled capabilities for other users to revise our OER as we are still working on creating a functional model. Github also does not have the capability at this time to merge 2 repositories from different sources, so remixing might prove to be difficult. As our theme for the semester has been “fresh eyes, fresh perspectives,” Green mentions that having an open practice with open content that’s backed by policy would inherently give the OER the pluralistic and co-creational perspectives that we are looking for (Green, 2025, 32:38). We would be curious to get some more information from people who use Github in more extensive ways to see how we could better satisfy the last 2 Rs that we are currently lacking.
While working through this course, one of the pivotal tasks Brittany and I were to do were close readings on articles pertinent to our research. As our research project pertains to supporting teachers with 3D printing integration at the elementary level, we were drawn to “The impact of teachers’ pedagogical beliefs, self‑efficacy, and technology value beliefs on 3D printing integration in K‑12 science classroom” by Li Cheng, Pavlo D. Antoneko, and Albert D. Ritzhaupt (2024). Not only was the article resonant with our topic of interest, but it happened to align perfectly with my own professional aspirations outside of the program. While reading this article, I was approached by a member of the school district’s Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) team to co-facilitate a workshop on SeeSaw – an online classroom platform where the class shares photos, videos, voice recordings, documents, and other multimedia examples of learning. Although I have been a SeeSaw ambassador to my school, and have supported my colleagues and students with SeeSaw use, I had never run my own workshop before. How was I going to structure the presentation As a passive consumer of professional development, I knew what ineffective professional development looked like, but pinpointing what made effective professional development was much more difficult. This is when I looked to Cheng et al’s article to see what I could incorporate into a 90 minute presentation.
I got further into detail on this in my blog post “Self-efficacy and the barriers we face with 3D printing integration: A close reading and reflection of Cheng et al. (2024)“, but essentially my presentation aimed to tackle Cheng’s concept of first-order and second-order barriers. First-order barriers are the barriers beyond a teacher’s control (funding, lack of professional development, and access to hardware and software), while second-order barriers are the constraints within the teacher’s control (i.e. self-efficacy, attitudes toward technology in the classroom, and personal pedagogical beliefs) (Cheng et al., 2024). By taking time to address both first and second-order barriers, I was able to facilitate an effective learning experience where teachers of various levels of expertise were able to work on something pertinent to their practice and have the support of myself, my co-facilitator, and their peers. This workshop was evidence that the recommendations Cheng et al. were effective and could make a difference. With this real-world experience of putting theory into practice, I was able to share with Brittany how the research could inform our OER with real-life experiences and reflections.
As we work toward the final steps of our project, Brittany and I will be continuing to look into ways to make our final project more accessible and more open. We really want our OER to reach as many teachers who are interested in 3D printing as possible and with little to no barriers of entry. We hope to continue to share our work with more experts in the field of accessibility and open education to further improve on our learning design.
Cheng, L., Antonenko, P. D., & Ritzhaupt, A. D. (2024). The impact of teachers’ pedagogical beliefs, self-efficacy, and technology value beliefs on 3D printing integration in K-12 science classrooms. Educational Technology Research and Development, 72(1), 181–208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-023-10276-3
Creative Commons. (n.d.). About CC Licenses. Creative Commons.
Cable, G. (2025, February 6). Open Educational Resources. [Webinar]. https://edtechuvic.ca/med/2025/03/06/accessibility-with-charlie-watson/
Watson, C. (2025, March 6). Adaptive technology and Digital Accessibility. [Webinar]. https://edtechuvic.ca/med/2025/03/06/accessibility-with-charlie-watson/
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