Curt Bonk, Indiana University
Diversity Statement
February 6, 2022
In the following
pages, I want to highlight ways in which I have displayed my commitment to
diversity, inclusion, justice, and equity during my academic career through
my community outreach, teaching, research, global collaboration efforts, and
leadership services; much of which aligns with the open position at ASU. For
three decades, I have explored how emerging technologies can offer
opportunities to increase access to education in an engaging, interactive, and
collaborative way. In such technology-enhanced learning environments, I am
interested in informal, nontraditional, open, and online education.
In my first faculty
position at West Virginia University, two faculty colleagues and I received a
grant in 1990-91 from the WV Governor’s office to create a learning center in
Wheeling, WV as part of our Project YES (Youth Enrichment Services) proposal. My
focus was to design the computer lab for the inner city youth which entailed
driving 90 miles each way during two summers to make it happen (watch
this 2-minute video interview from 1990 about the project or the longer 5-minute overview ) and then to help run summer
camps in Wheeling. I carried the spirit of Project YES when arriving at Indiana
University in August 1992. For instance, from 1994-1996, I worked with Dr. Ken
Hay on an elementary student weather collaboration project involving middle
school youth in inner city Indianapolis, a private school in the suburbs, and rural
Helmsburg, Indiana. After that, Dr. Bill Sugar and I analyzed World Forum data
from the University of Michigan, the University of St. Thomas, and IU. That
data involved Arctic explorers, including Will Steger from National Geographic,
interacting with youth around the world on an expedition to the North Pole. In
this research project, we explored the degree of perspective shown in online
message reactions to Artic Alerts from explorers in a global role play
activity.
In addition to this
work with K-12 youth, my commitment to diversity, inclusion, justice, and
equity has been shown in myriad other ways; let me delineate a few. First, a
few years after arriving at Indiana University (IU), I successfully nominated
and sponsored two scholars, Dr. Art Garmon and Dr. Valerie Maholmes, in 1995, as
part of the IU Minority Faculty Fellowships program. Valerie and I team-taught
a course on critical and creative thinking in an Indianapolis area school as an
outreach effort. A few years later, I was successful in sponsoring a young scholar
from Purdue in the same Minority Fellows program.
Sponsoring and
mentoring people to bring diversity to IU is part of what I do and who I am.
Since 1995, have sponsored 37 visiting scholars including ones from China,
Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Belgium, Botswana, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Japan, Kazakhstan,
Azerbaijan, Turkey, Thailand, Australia, Italy, Finland, Russia, Morocco,
Palestine, South Sudan, India, New Zealand, and South Africa. In fact, my
classes, especially R546 on instructional strategies, sometimes feel like a miniature
United Nations meeting with participants from more than a dozen countries in
the room bringing fantastic food and diverse experiences and perspectives from
around the world. All of these wonderful educators are my friends and many of
them recently contributed to my “Transformative Teaching Around the World”
book that was published in January 2022. This new book contains 42 short
emotion laden stories of how award-winning Fulbright teachers and other former
students from 22 countries are using the R546 content.
In addition to that
new book meant for multicultural education courses, I have attempted to address
learner equity needs with free and open resources. For example, I saw the price
gouging of my former publisher (Wiley/Jossey-Bass) when I was in the
Philippines in 2012. In response, I promised the people attending my keynote in
Manila that my next book on online motivation and engagement would be free to
them (i.e., “Adding Some TEC-VARIETY;” see http://tec-variety.com/). Two years later, using extensive
personal funding, I self-published that free book which more than a quarter
million people have downloaded in English and Chinese since 2014. Notably, in
the spring of 2012, I taught the first massive open online course (MOOC)
offered by Blackboard (and first MOOC at IU) related to teaching online to
nearly 4,000 instructors using the free version of Blackboard called
CourseSites. I have also produced a set of 27 video primers to help IU
education faculty members learn to teach online called the “Video Primers in
an Online Repository of e-Teaching and Learning” (V-PORTAL).
I convinced our dean’s office to make these videos free to the world community,
and, since that time, over 170,000 educators around the planet have downloaded,
shared, used, and remixed these videos. The V-PORTAL has been used for training
by universities, schools, military bases, and higher education systems across
entire countries (e.g., the UAE and Saudi Arabia). In addition, to the free
book, the MOOC, and the videos related to online teaching and learning, I have created
eight “share” sites to address educational equity and access, including
TrainingShare.com for all my talks and workshops and PublicationShare.com for
my open access publications. Again, I tapped into personal funds to create
these websites for sharing educational resources.
I have an open
access and open-door policy in all my courses. Such an approach is consistent
with my authoring of the book, “The World Is Open,” and my co-founding
of the conference “Global Learn.” In fact, I am known as the World is Open guy and
people greet me with their arms stretched high to indicate the goal is to have open
and accessible learning for all people. With a “World Is Open” mentality,
anyone can attend, sit in, and contribute to my classes and bring their kids (and
many do). In the online version of both my emerging learning technologies class
(R678) and my introductory class on instructional technology foundations course
(R511), there are often one or more guests each week from North America and, at
times, internationally. Such guests have authored articles or books to which my
class has been assigned or are practitioners implementing such ideas in the
teaching and learning trenches. In addition, I typically advertise my special
class events and guest presentations to colleagues, former students, and former
visiting scholars around the world so that my students can learn from them too.
In the late 1990s
and early 2000s, I developed two projects which both further illustrate my
commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. One project from 1998-2003 was
the Teacher Institute for Curriculum Knowledge about the Integration of
Technology (TICKIT). TICKIT was a funded project designed for south and central
rural Indiana teachers from 4-6 schools each year to learn how to effectively
integrate technology despite significant resource and internet access
constraints found in all too many of these small rural school communities at
that time. Importantly, dozens of teachers in this project went from novice
technology users to being statewide leaders by the end of the year.
Another parallel project
from 1996-1997 was the Conferencing on the Web (i.e., COW) project where
preservice teachers from IU generated case problems to solve based on their
field experiences in urban, rural, and suburban Indiana schools. That project
quickly expanded into The Intraplanetary Teacher Learning Exchange (i.e.,
TITLE) (1998-2002) initiative involving preservice teachers from IU as well as
Texas A&M, the University of South Carolina, the Universities of Oulu and
Jyvaskyla in Finland, Warwick University in the UK, Kyung Hee University in
Seoul, and students in universities in Peru. In TITLE, these preservice
teachers solved the problems posed by their peers in other countries.
Importantly, much research from the COW and TITLE projects was published
including a paper involving a cross-cultural comparison of online collaboration
among pre-service teachers in JCMC in 2002.
Such research
involving global education continued with a series of studies on participatory
technology of the Web 2.0 in the late 2000s. For instance, students from IU,
the University of Houston, Indiana State, the Open University of Malaysia,
Beijing Normal University, and National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan
collaborated to build a wikibook entitled “The Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning
Technologies” (the WELT). That same year, in a collaboration IST alum Dr.
Mimi Lee at the University of Houston (UH), UH students and IU students collaborated
to write a wikibook, The Practice of Learning Theories (The POLT).
Through these cross-cultural and cross-institutional wikibook projects, Mimi
and I were attempting to foster learner social construction and negotiation of
knowledge as well as their perspective taking and collaboration skills.
Importantly, this series of wikibook studies was published in several journal
articles and chapters from 2008-2011; one of which received a best paper award
at AECT in 2012.
During the past
decade, I have published research related to the participatory Web, such as
blogging in China and in Korea when these empowering tools were helping move
educational systems in East Asia and
Southeast Asia toward more learner-centered and inclusive practices. More
recently, I have had four publications on flipped learning in Korea with two IU
IST alumni as well as two publications on flipped learning and OER in China
with a former visiting scholar; six total publications between 2015 and 2021.
Most recently, I
have been focused on self-directly open and online learning (SOLEs). In
particular, I am exploring learner motivation and self-directed learning (SDL)
within MOOCs and other open education pursuits. My recent MOOCs research publications
from 2018-2021 include ones on personalization and cultural sensitivity in
MOOCs. MOOCs and other forms of open and online education have the potential to
substantially address many critical equity, access, and inclusion challenges
across educational sectors. This work has resulted in about a dozen research
projects and publications as well as three books; including MOOCs and Open
Education Around the World (2015) and MOOCs and Open Education in the
Global South (2020), both published by Routledge. My team is now studying SDL
in online language learning using Duolingo as well as Nepali youth
self-directing their learning of English and taking other courses via MOOCs
during the pandemic. We are presently starting a study of MOOC instructors in
South America, including how to design courses to be more inclusive.
Finally, a key
diversity, equity, and inclusion item to note began with the pandemic in March
2020. At that time, my colleagues, Chris Dede at Harvard, Punya Mishra at ASU,
and Yong Zhao at the University of Kansas, and I banded together to offer a
weekly webcast or podcast show on Saturdays called Silver
Lining for Learning
(SLL). SLL, which opened on March 21, 2020, now has produced over 90 Episodes. It is an ongoing conversation
on the future of learning with education innovators and education leaders
across the globe. Typically, SLL shows are forward looking (and sometimes controversial)
with the purpose to bring together educational thought leaders, entrepreneurs,
and innovators around the world and inspire new educational models and
innovations. The guests on SLL (e.g., students, teachers, school
administrators, researchers, and education entrepreneurs) have come from all
over the world—from highly impoverished settings in Africa, Central America,
and Asia, where resources for education can be extremely limited, to contexts
that are significantly better off, such as well-resourced educational
organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom. Across the past two
years of episodes, we have found that despite the differences in educational
resources, opportunities, accessibility, and overall wealth, innovators have a
number of common characteristics such as passion, vision, persistence, purpose,
and a deep commitment to making education better.
As shown from the
above, I address diversity, equity, and inclusion in my “world is open” course
policies and associated course activities as well as in my weekly webcast show
content in SLL, my research on MOOCs and open education as well as emerging
learning technologies, my extensive sponsorship and mentorship of minority and
international scholars, my globally inclusive book projects, my global network
and outreach, and in my very first grant funded project in academia—Project YES
for at-risk and disadvantaged youth in Wheeling, West Virginia. Please see
the appendix below for additional examples of diversity, equity, and inclusion
activities from the past few years including the training of teachers in
Botswana, Sri Lanka, the Cree Nation in Alberta, Puerto Rico, Peru, and Saudi
Arabia for online learning.
Appendix:
Recent Examples of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Related Activities
#1. Oct. 2021: Sync
session on research on SDL for Ed Tech students at Peking U., Beijing, China.
#2. July 2021:
Presented two virtual talks on how to motivate and engage online learners,
sponsored by the U.S. Embassy/Consulate in Seoul and Korea
Association of Teachers of English (KATE), Korea.
#3. May 2021:
Presentation on the Tech Revolution, at Grad Student Research Conf in U of
Hong Kong.
#4. March 2021:
Sync Session on emerging tech for Ed Tech Students, Ewha Womans U, Seoul, Korea.
#5.
March 2021: Panelist on Diversity, Equity, &
Inclusion in IST Research. IST Conference, IU.
#6. March 2021
& June 2020, Presented to the Contact
North Network in Ontario how to Motivate and Engage Online Learners (set
attendance records: 346 people from 60+ countries (650 signed up) Available: https://youtu.be/1uMc7pOO2to and https://youtu.be/Pn14Y4RZiR8
#7. Feb 2021: Sync
Session on videoconferencing and global ed for K-12 teachers in Patterson,
NJ.
#8. Jan 2021: Sync
Session for ed tech students at Inonu Univ, Turkey: https://youtu.be/k4sx0UHkRiY
#9. Dec 2020: Sync
session on research on SDL for Ed Tech students at IIT Bombay (Mumbai),
India.
#10. Dec 2020: Botswana
teacher training, created videos on online pedagogy and engaging online
learning environments: (1) Education 20/20 (https://youtu.be/50EW3gWRzxI, (2) TEC-VARIETY (https://youtu.be/F12QLayANkM), (3) R2D2 (https://youtu.be/RO6imKusycQ
#11. Fall 2020, Coordinator/presenter,
MOOC Webinar Series, MOOC Dev. Center, Beijing Normal U.
#12. Nov 2020: Sync session for
instructors of the Open University of Sri Lanka on motivating and authentic
online learning. https://tinyurl.com/2p8bwv5c, https://tinyurl.com/yckw6w97
#13. Oct 2020 &
June 2020, Present to Middle East/Gulf Region Teachers on Motivating
Online Lrng; Nat’l eLearning Center, Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia: https://tinyurl.com/2p833ejj; The 6th Arab Gulf Tchr Forum 2020, MOE, Dubai,
UAE; 19th annual MEITAL Nat’l Conf 2021, Israel Center for
Lrng Tech.
#14. July 2020: Present to CS
Long Beach Instructors at Equity, Diversity, &
Inclusion event.
#15. July 2020:
Partnered with Hofstra U. to offer Masterclasses on blended learning and
engaging online learning for K-12 teachers in Paterson, New Jersey & NYC
(many teaching underprivileged youth).
#16. July 2020: First Nation
(Cree) people in Alberta, Maskwacis Cultural College, Sessions on writing (https://youtu.be/V04pYv0K23E) and blended learning (https://youtu.be/JMfx1vc3Gvs).
#17. June 2020: Sync session on
Ed Tech for English for Nepali teachers plus 30 other countries.
#18. June 2020:
Sync sessions with Puerto Rican teachers about Tech in Ed, Caribbean U.,
Ponce.
#19. May 2020:
Present on designing MOOCs for Commonwealth of Learning (participants from India
Bangladesh, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Trinidad, Tobago, USA), https://youtu.be/kmsWZi3vyrg
#20. Sept 2019: Coordinator/Moderator of
Conference Panel on MOOCs and Open Education in the Global South,
Pan-Commonwealth Forum 9 (PCF9), Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
#21. Nov 2019: Present to
teachers in Arequipa, Peru on Teaching and Learning with Technology.
#22. Oct 2018: Sync
interview on “the State of E-Learning,” for those TESOL Educators
International Network (“Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages”), https://youtu.be/z-eWa7SNMd8
#23 2018
Contributor, United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) project of
Taylor & Francis, Routledge, & CRC Pub. Contributed: OER from my MOOCs
book.
#24. 2016 & 2017: Various
Sessions for Russian Scholars in International Education Visiting IU,
including Session on Cultural Inclusion and Sensitivity in E-Learning.
#25. Jan 2016: Various Sessions
on online pedagogy for educators from Afghanistan in Junior Faculty
Development Program visiting IU, Center
for Int’l Ed, Development and Research (CIEDR).
#26: 2015-2020,
Faculty Associate, Center for Int’t Educ, Development & Research (CIEDR),
IU.