Social-Justice-Oriented Introductory Lecture Videos for GMST 121: Fairy Tales & Popular Culture

Project Title	Social-Justice-Oriented Introductory Lecture Videos for GMST 121: Fairy Tales & Popular Culture
Principal Investigator	Elizabeth Nijdam
Faculty	Arts
Funding Year	2024
Project Summary	First taught in 2020, and a recipient of the Innovate German Award in 2022, GMST 121: Fairy Tales and Popular Culture has grown to become the largest-enrolled course in the German Studies program, with a full class of 125 students in the Fall 2023 term and with increasing demand each year across disciplines at UBC. The course approaches the storytelling tradition of the Brothers Grimm through the perspectives of social-justice-oriented disciplines and Indigenous storytelling. By analyzing fairy tales through these lenses, the course invites students to reflect on the persisting resonance of these narratives and the ways they shape and reflect politics and culture today. This project will ensure the course’s sustainability by creating a modular, online, open-access database through Pressbooks, consisting of lesson plans, video lectures, and supplementary learning materials. As an OER, the course can be expanded iteratively by new contributors with relatively little preparatory work, thereby allowing for its continuance in future years for new classes across UBC departments and audiences beyond the university. In addition to drawing from disciplines such as gender, race, queer, sexuality, and disability studies, it also connects with Indigenous storytelling to compare Indigenous and Western storytelling methods, oral traditions. By turning GMST 121 into an OER, we will expand the course’s availability to a larger student body (exceeding the 125 registrants in Fall 2023) as an asynchronous course, secure its affordability to students through free, open-access material, and ensure its ability to be taught by a diversity of faculty and sessional instructors without the increased labour of course design and prep. The project’s fourteen modules will incorporate video lectures, H5P activities, and supplementary reading for increased accessibility and an engaging learning format that critically engages with these stories through mixed media and new visual forms.
Grant type	OER Affordability
Funded Amount	$25,000