Tutorial: Opening Up Education
8. Examples of Open Pedagogy in action
There is a close connection between networking, and social media such as blogs and wikis, which enable students to create open educational resources, and open pedagogy.
With open pedagogy projects, students are empowered to engage in information creation through non-disposable or renewable assignments. Renewable assignments, as opposed to disposable assignments, are defined as tasks in which students compile and openly publish their work so that the assignment outcome is inherently valuable to the community (Chen, 2018; Wiley & Hilton, 2018). The student is both a creator and contributor of assignments that are openly licensed, allowing the content to be shared, revised, and reused by future students in a course (Van Allen & Katz, 2020).
In the video below, the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning and education fellow at Creative Commons, David Wiley describes renewable assignments, which “add value to the world, students see value in doing them, while teachers see value in grading them”.
The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.
Video: Renewable assignments [13:04]
Video adapted from "High Impact Practices for Integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) into University Courses" by David Wiley, Lumen Learning, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Examples of Open Pedagogy in action may include (Elder, 2019; DeRosa & Jhangiani, 2019; McClean, 2017):
Students as Textbook Contributors, like the “Open Anthropology of the earlier American Lit” project, where Robin DeRosa collaborates with students in an American literature survey course to create an open anthology of public domain literature to replace a commercial text.
Students as OER Adapters, like “The Power of Open Educational Resources” project from David Wiley, where students adapted an existing open textbook to create a new version tailored for instructional designers.
Students as Question Bank Authors, like the “Principles of Social Psychology” project, where students write multiple-choice questions in a social psychology course that uses an open textbook for which there is no associated question bank.
Students as Wikipedia Contributors, like the “Murder, Madness and Mayhem” project, where undergraduate students in a Spanish course edited and created Wikipedia articles with the goal of increasing the number of "featured articles" on the course's topic, Latin American literature.
Additional material
You can find more about open pedagogy and renewable assignments at Open Pedagogy of Iowa State University and Open Pedagogy by Rebus Community.
Examples adapted from the Introduction to Open Pedagogy from University of Texas Arlington, licensed under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International License.