The Power of OER with Profs. Mary Rowe and Elizabeth Siler (S1:E10)

Key Takeaways

today on the podcast we're highlighting the power of open educational resources or oer i love using oer one thing i love about teaching oer is that i get to teach what i want to teach what i think my students need to know in the way they need to learn it instead of just defaulting to what the textbooks say in this episode i invited two instructors in to talk about open educational resources one of them teaches negotiation and management here at mit and shares her course materials in mit open courseware the other recently adapted those materials for use in her own course at another university an organizational ombudsperson at mit for 42 years adjunct professor mary rowe was among the very first instructors to put her course materials on opencourseware almost 20 years ago that course is titled 15667 negotiation and conflict management associate professor elizabeth seiler has used and adapted the materials from this course in her teachings at worcester state university when we brought these two instructors together something really special happened while much of the conversation did center on negotiation itself mary and elizabeth simultaneously began a real real-time collaboration about how to teach negotiation with oer from mary's course the conversation brought forward so much of what we at ocw hope oer can do for educators you know things like creating community shared ownership of learning materials and fuel for inspired teaching that we just really wanted to share it with you we hope it will help you find new inspiration for using oer in your teaching so without any further ado let's jump into the conversation you'll hear me talking with elizabeth first and we start with one of my own insecurities about negotiation and anxiety some of you may share when i think about negotiation i like freeze up i'm like oh god i have to negotiate a salary i'm never going to get what i want i can't ask for what i want well that's one of the reasons that i really like this course learning it and teaching it it's one of the things that this is probably true for most students and most people they don't really like to deal with conflict but learning about negotiation is a way that you can learn that there are different ways to handle a conflict or handle a negotiation without changing your personality right without being something that you're not you know it's their skills and their behaviors but they're not personality traits you know you can be shy and still be clear in what you want and ask questions you can still be a successful negotiator and still not like speaking in public i think that's a wonderful example of how negotiation specialists try to build options which is that those who get into negotiations about anything including bedtime for children want to come up with options i'm taking that to heart as i think about my three-year-old tonight [Music] so the course 15667 the one we have on mit open courseware it involves a number of case studies and simulations which you've made openly available mary to the world tell us about the role of case studies in the course so case studies and discussing real life is how you learn negotiations it's absolutely essential there's one of them called dealing with an aggressive competitive negotiator and this was a case the main characters named mr canny and he just wants what you're selling but he won't admit it and he won't give in and he won't you know he keeps asking for more and i mean he's a real pain but um what i love about this is that it the students read this and they're like ah what do i do this person how do i deal with this person what's going on you know and then they talk about it with each other and they start to see that okay there's some things we could do and then we start to apply the process of well what are his interests right what does he want what's going on behind the scenes you know he's being very aggressive but why is that and what does he like and how might you talk to this person so he'll be more likely to take you seriously and so the two things i like about this is one is that the teaching notes for some of these are really thorough and lovely and wonderful is this list that's like two pages long of things that you could do to address the situation but the other thing about it is that this is written so strongly that my students had some really visceral reactions to this some of them got really felt really angry we did this at the end of the class the end of the semester so that they were more comfortable talking about they're more comfortable with self-disclosure about how they were feeling and what went on and some of them got really angry some of them got really scared you know um i was thrilled when you know this very articulate very kind of cool hockey player guy in my class said i'll admit it you know i was a little nervous when i was reading this like yes okay good um and so they could talk about how you have to deal with your own emotions right before you can go on and negotiate which in business so much emotions are treated like they are bad or that people don't have emotions but you can't really negotiate well if you're afraid you know or you can't negotiate well with somebody if you're angry so one of the things we talked about at the end is okay here's how you felt about this what are some things that you do i mean there was money involved in it but the thing that was really important about that one to me was to get the students to acknowledge their emotions and figure out how to deal with them and then to see that there's a whole lot more things they could do in the situation than they thought of than they had thought about before it's hard to imagine elizabeth a more skillful discussion of teaching that case uh listening to you i'm i notice two things one of them is that you've illuminated perfectly that we're all negotiating with ourselves and how we're dealing with our negotiation with our our dealing with our emotions um we've got two different points of view i've got to make this work and i'm panicked or i'm furious so you're opening up a discussion at the end of the class about even not just how i notice that negotiations are important i guess this should have been my first point is that emotions are important that after all relationships between people are almost always the most important thing going on even more so than money but secondly that in dealing with my emotions that i might be negotiating with myself i loved your description and i love how you can tie that back to the theory right negotiating with yourself because uh well that's frankly that's one of the hardest things i find about teaching is until i really really know like until i've taught the course a lot or really know it it takes me longer to make those connections from the student experience to the to the theory so it's really helpful to see that well and it's helpful to me to listen to you and see it so always learning [Music] listening to elizabeth again now reminded me of how every student who role plays has a chance to learn their own strengths and their own vulnerabilities and i think that could be elucidated better in the teaching i used to say at the beginning of the course that i have no idea whether we can teach people to negotiate better in the sense of getting more of what you want i was pretty sure that we can teach how you and your team can lose less in working with other people i'd like to think more about that in revising the course we haven't actually proven that we can teach people to negotiate better in part because how well you negotiate is for you to decide and i can't tell you how you would think of it you might watch me negotiate and think i'd given up the store and i'm pretty happy about it because i've maintained the relationships that mattered to me but i think we can teach people to defend themselves better and that we can prove that anyway you're right on the fringe now of what i've been thinking about the case studies in 15667 are designed for graduate students in the mit sloan school of management and many of these students come to the course with previous management and business experience my students have not had the same kinds of work experience that a graduate student would have so i went and added some things in to explain well this is how a law firm works or this is what a defense contractor does and this is the way the organization is structured so when you say this this is what it means when it says this this is what it means it's just really helpful because that that's the stuff that they would need to know to make a decision but they don't need to know it to learn how to negotiate i try to get the confusing things out of the way so they can concentrate on what are the interests you know and how what am i going to say very good ideas it seems like you're touching on an important aspect of what it means to teach with oer what it means to really discover something and then to change it to make it work for your students yeah i love using oer one thing i love about teaching oer is that i get to teach what i want to teach what i think my students need to know in the way they need to learn it instead of just defaulting to what the textbooks say and sometimes that means using a textbook that's an open resource and just adding things in sometimes it means pulling from more than one textbook sometimes it means pulling things from writing things and pulling in podcasts and articles and and the newspaper from newspaper from yesterday right i asked elizabeth if she had any tips for educators who wanted to begin teaching with oer the first thing i would do is to talk to your librarian because librarians are pretty much at the forefront of open education resources the next thing i would say is to find somebody to work with find some community which is mary's nodding it's a lot easier if you were starting a course kind of from scratch the way i was with this course to find somebody to work with because it helps split up the workload and it gives you somebody to bounce ideas off of and the other thing is just to think about what you what's working and what's not working about your correct course because if something's not working you can probably find something else to replace it it's not just about using a textbook that's free so that your students will have it it's also about being able to teach what you think they need to learn the other thing is that if you're using open educational resources that you can mix and match there are several meta search engines for oer materials right now and you know the good news is the bad news that there are so many of them you might have to dig through to find what you're looking for but the good news is that there is a lot out there and if there's not then you can write it elizabeth what plans do you have to share the materials you've adapted uh from mary's course with others right that's part of open education resources overall is community again and it's doing what you have and sharing it with other people once i finish i'm probably going to work with the instructional designer at my school actually to put things in a word document and pdf document so that they could be in a format that's can be easily adapted by other professors and then find a platform for it before we ended our conversation i asked mary and elizabeth if there was anything else they wanted to ask each other about teaching with the oer in 15667 well i would like to ask elizabeth did you use the task of writing a perceived injurious experience yes i did i the reason that i ask is that of everything that i ever stumbled into of course everything you've heard from me is hindsight i never had the wit to plan it but of everything that i ever came up with in teaching negotiations the perceived injurious letter and various variations of it flew by far the furthest i would get requests i remember one from canada to reproduce the instructions in 500 000 copies for school for a elementary school or something and still on my website at sloan it's now called ideas to consider if you've been harassed right but basically the notion of how to deal with a situation where you have felt injured or or hurt so i'm very interested in your experience with it yeah for one of the last assignments in the semester the students could write the perceived and juris experience experience right they could write a pie letter or they could write an apology letter they could choose and they could write about something from themselves in their own life or they could write about something from one of the cases because not everybody has the same level of comfort and disclosing and that's fine they can still learn and what i found out was first of all i was really surprised still even with being around you know hundreds of undergraduates every day just how much how personal people were willing to get at this i mean it it was clear they were i was the only person who was going to read this nobody was ever going to do it they didn't have to send it but people got really personal and i thought they would be getting personal more about how they'd been injured but they got really personal and really explicit and really thoughtful about how they had hurt other people and that was really powerful i mean like i was i was kind of blown away by how willing they were to take this on and the things they said and i wish i had done it earlier in the semester so that i could find out some more you know how did they react to that like what did they get out of it going back to the beginning of this i think that maybe why this spoke to me so much it's because it was everything every day and that there are a lot of things you can do in business classes with a very low amount of emotions involved you know and that's great but this isn't one of them and we don't really talk about it much in any other business classes but we're human as my finance professor said annabelle burrell and she said we are more than rational beings right and i think this is one of the places where that's incredibly clear you remind me also that it's the basis for leadership to the extent that management training includes a discussion of leadership emotions and relationships are profoundly fundamental you to have completely changed my perspective on what negotiation is i feel like you've created a pathway for me to explore this area more i feel like it's accessible to me that i might actually be good at it that i might be doing it already without knowing it [Music] if you're getting the same feeling that maybe you or your students might already be or could become good at negotiation with the right tools and want to learn more you can explore download reuse and remix all of mary's teaching materials from our mit open courseware website on our website and in the show notes you'll find the case study about dealing with an aggressive competitive negotiator like mr canny and guidelines for writing a perceived injurious experience letter if you like elizabeth use these or other oer from opencourseware in your teaching we'd love to hear about it because when you share your story of using oer you inspire others and that's what we're all about thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed season one of chalk radio we're already hard at work on season two if there's a professor you'd like to hear from reach out and let us know until next time i'm sarah hansen from mit open courseware you