Providing Equitable Access to a 21 Century Education: The 1-1 Device Model and GSuite Collaboration Tools in the Classroom

This workshop will be facilitated by three faculty members from the College of DuPage (COD) who were awarded an internal Resource for Excellence grant that funded the purchase of a library of laptop devices (Chromebooks) which were made available to all students in classes taught by these faculty in Fall 2017. The classes were specifically redesigned to use Google's GSuite collaboration tools, like docs and sites, and they were built around the 1-1 model: every student was required to bring his or her device to every class meeting.

Workshop attendees will learn about how faculty and staff at College of DuPage implemented the device purchase and checkout system and about the research data gathered as part of the pilot. Most importantly, though, attendees will engage directly with redesigned curricula, actually doing some of the collaborative, 1-1 activities using GSuite tools that students in the pilot were assigned. The workshop will conclude with a facilitated networking session so that attendees can connect with others who are looking to implement, or are in the process of implementing, a 1-1 device model and undertaking the curricular redesign such implementation enables.  Attendees will interact with facilitators and with each other throughout the workshop and will leave with actionable strategies that can be put into practice at their home institutions.

The workshop will begin with a poll of attendees (via Kahoot or PollEverywhere, for example) to gather input about what a "21st Century" education might look like, particularly as it unfolds on the ground level, in the actual, everyday classroom, be it fully f2f or in the blended mode. We will use this opening to consider whether all students have equitable access to any learning models that require significant in-class computer work, for example, or frequent online collaboration.

Certainly we want our students to be getting a 21st century education, preparing them to be content creators and collaborators, effective communicators in a digital landscape, and literate across digital, social venues that simply did not exist ten or even five years ago.  One approach to rethinking education along these lines, especially where the teaching of writing and communication is concerned, has involved the move towards collaborative and dynamic content creation tools, like those offered as part of Google for Education's GSuite apps, like docs, slides, forms, and sites. Generally, we celebrate and encourage innovative curricular design, we look to "break new ground," as the OLC Innovate web page says.  But what happens if not all students are provided the opportunity to take advantage of great, 21st century curricular revisions?  We embrace the BYOD, 1-1 computing model, in which every student is required to bring a device to each, but what about the student who doesn't have a device, or whose laptop is heavy, old, and slow? 

The workshop will use as its initial frame the proposition that, perhaps ironically and unintentionally, our best curricular redesign efforts to break new ground can actually harm the very students we most want to help, inadvertently disempowering--rather than empowering--them, and ultimately exacerbating educational inequalities that have traditionally privileged a few but not all students.

The solution that this workshop will explore reflects the work undertaken by the workshop facilitators as part of a grant-funded pilot, which provided for the institutional purchase of a "library" of Chromebook devices; these were made available to all students who were part of the pilot group of courses in Fall 2017.  With this library of devices in place, faculty could undertake major curricular redesign around the 1-1 (or what we call the "augmented-BYOD") model whereby every student would bring his or her device to every class meeting.  Classes were revised to work heavily in the collaborative content creation tools that make up the Google for Education GSuite: including Google docs, slides, forms, and sites (among others).

It was only within the context of being able to provide a laptop device to any student who needed one that truly equitable access could be provided to what we feel were meaningful and necessary curricular redesign efforts, ones focused on breaking new ground and better preparing students to be digitally literate citizens in the 21st century.

After covering the logistics that went into securing grant funding and then implementing the pilot project (including device use policies and checkout procedures), the workshop will engage attendees directly with some of the collaborative activities used in the redesigned pilot project classes.

Significant workshop time will also be devoted to having attendees share their individual and/or institution-specific goals for moving to the 1-1 model and supporting the curricular redesign that the 1-1 model can afford. This will be facilitated by a real-time Google form that workshop participants complete and whose results we will use to organizing effective networking.

From sharing goals, potential progress towards those goals, and barriers to implementation, workshop attendees will be guided through a networking session so that they can connect with others in the room and thus leave the workshop with two key resources: implementation strategies as provided by the workshop leaders and also new contacts from across a range of institutions.

Workshop facilitators will create a website that will be shared with all attendees in order to document the conversation and dialog from the workshop, reflect attendee input during the workshop (polling and survey results, for example), and that will provide important resources for the 1-1 device model and curricular redesign strategies.