An OER Review: “Alright” and the History of the Black Protest Songs

“It’s bigger than hip hop,” a quotable taken from underground rap group Dead Prez ( Dead Prez – Hip Hop), which identifies the role of music and its connection to African American liberation and an anthem in its own right.  “Alright” and the History of Black Protest Songs – TeachRock, an open education resource (ORE), is taken from the OERcommons.com repository for an up-close look at its effectiveness and to provide a critique of how it could be re-imagined.  In essence, the teachtrock.org lesson, “Alright” and the History of the Black Protest Songs, takes the statement of music being bigger the just entertainment and transforms it into a practical standalone lesson. 

This Learning Object (LO) pulls in past and current musical art and provides instructional material and resources to immerse the learner.  The learner critically examines lyrics and compares them to the social movements of the era. Prior knowledge or prerequisites are not needed as additional information about the artist or song presented is embedded in the Distant Learning Packet (DLP) lesson as an all-inclusive LO.  “Alright” and the History of the Black Protest Songs LO design incorporates the institutional production model of integrity, “where the OER are very similar to the original material and as complete as possible (Spector et al., 2014. p. 784)”.   The OER is a facsimile of the original lesson with all supplemental material and links in tacked.

Having well-developed objectives and a master goal, “Alright” and the History of the Black Protest Songs  “instructional design is planned in the preparation of accomplishment as objectives and goals give the route that how to evaluate student’s skills and ability (Ashfaq et al., 2017. p. 3)”.  It lays out the instructional material in an organized process where the student can lead themselves within an online environment or as an instructor-led face-to-face setting. Having the instructional flexibility of either online or face-to-face and the ability to break-up or re-imagine the LO into further mini lessons by pulling out one component or artist to examine adds to the effectiveness of the LO.   “Education is cradle to grave continuous process as it describes extremely significant and permanent property of every individual (Ashfaq et al., 2017. p. 2)”.  As a well-designed LO, the overarching goal of knowledge construction by utilizing critical thinking to interpret and evaluate both songs and protest movements is designed to “build awareness or provide information as an informed program (Clark et al., 2016. p. 19)”.

• 

• 

• 

• 

The re-imagining of this LO incorporates one central area. Since the LO has a goal of knowledge construction, assessment of this construction is vital; more specifically, formative assessment as summative is already ingrained into the LO design.  Re-imagining this lesson with embedded formative assessments allows the instructor to address misconceptions by revising instructional material and strategies before the summative assessment.  Spector et al. (2014) critiques, “there does not appear to be a single initiative dedicated to creating and sharing openly licensed assessment items in standard formats for use with existing open educational resources (p.787)”

Embedding formative assessments throughout the lesson by re-imagining the summative constructed-response questions into a few formative constructed responses as a small group or class discussions during face-to-face or a discussion boards for e-learning environments provides the instructor the opportunity to gather data to then apply the results from the data to revise the lesson. Incorporating formative assessment paired with timely and effective feedback creates a learning environment of self-efficacy for the learner, especially disadvantage and low-achieving learners (Spector et al., 2014. p. 314).  “If open educational resources are ever to reach their potential, they will need to be paired with open assessment resources that can serve formative and summative assessment roles for learners (Spector et al., 2014. p. 787). 

References

Ashfaq, M., Ajmal, M., Iqbal, M. J., & Mehmood Ch., T. (2017). A compact instructional design solves learning problems and creates learning opportunities. Bulletin of Education and Research, 39(3), 1–17.

Clark, R. C. & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-Learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley

Spector, J. M., Merrill, M. D., Elen, J., & Bishop, M. J. (2014). Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (Vol. 4). Springer New York