A Beginner's Guide to Open Pedagogy

You may be familiar with open educational resources (OER) and how they can make a course more affordable for your students. Using OER in your classroom helps create an even playing field for your students, as it allows all students regardless of income to access the course materials from the beginning of the semester. Research shows that post-secondary students are struggling to keep up with the cost of textbooks. In fact, one study by Jhangiani and Jhangiani (2017) found that 54% of their survey sample of B.C. post-secondary students opted to not purchase a required textbook at least once during their time in higher education.

While using OER for your course creates a more affordable learning environment for your students, it's valuable to look beyond the cost savings of OER and examine some of their pedagogical affordances. You're probably already working your hardest to use active learning approaches like problem-based learning, simulations, or even something as simple as think-pair-share to create an engaging and student centred classroom.

Open pedagogy is another strategy you can use to create a more student centred environment. Read on to learn more about this pedagogical approach and how it can benefit students in your classroom, while livening up your assignment design:

1) Moving Away from Disposable Assignments
David Wiley, a thought leader in OER and open pedagogy, coined the term 'disposable assignments' in 2013. He states that "not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world" (Wiley, 2013). A disposable assignment is something that a student creates, but the end product is only seen by the instructor or T.A. Once the student gets their grade, the assignment tends to be tossed aside, never to be used or looked at again. Students typically hate completing this kind of assignment...and you've probably heard many of your colleagues complain when marking an assignment like this! (Wiley, 2013).

Wiley (2013) states that the OER 5R permission framework lets faculty create more authentic learning experiences, as students can act as knowledge producers and share their course work more broadly with the larger educational community. For example, a course using open educational practices might have students edit a Wikipedia entry or create ancillary learning materials for an open textbook.

2) Defining Open Pedagogy
Open pedagogy has a somewhat fluid definition at the moment; however, there are some common themes that come out of this approach to educational practice in the classroom.

• Access & Ability to engage with 5R framework: Wiley (2017a) discusses how "open pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you are using OER." While he now uses the term OER-enabled pedagogy (Wiley, 2017b) to refer to open pedagogy, his definition of open educational practices firmly places the emphasis on how the 5R permission framework provides students with enhanced learning opportunities because they are no longer restricted by traditional copyright.

• Learner-driven: Open pedagogy can also be seen as enabling learner-driven experiences, where students share their own experience and understanding of course materials. For example, an open educational project in a classroom might involve students modifying or adding content to an OER to improve the content from a beginners' perspective. DeRosa and Jhangiani (2017) see these processes as allowing students to interrogate current educational practices through a more critical lens.

• Students as creators & collaborators: Students are no longer just absorbing knowledge; instead, they're now adding back to the scholarly conversation by creating or modifying content. This allows them to practice being part of a larger learning community and have more of a presence in conversations about the subject matter they're learning about. In open pedagogy assignments, students typically will comment and provide peer-review, which allows them to be part of a collaborative learning environment.

• Open, reflective learning process: Students are opening up their reflections on the learning process to a broader community. They're no longer sharing their reflections with just a professor, but can now receive feedback from others.

While the above section of this post only highlighted some of the common themes of open pedagogy, you can dig deeper into the different perspectives by reading the excellent list of resources that Hendricks (2017) compiled in her blog post series on understanding and navigating open pedagogy.

3) Examples of Open Pedagogy in Practice
So now that you know a bit more about open pedagogy and some of its benefits for students, it can be useful to look at some examples of open pedagogy in practice:

• Robin DeRosa from Plymouth State University worked with her students to create an open textbook called the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature. Students located materials, wrote chapter introductions, and even translated some of the text (Sheridan, 2017).

• Jon Beasley-Murray, a professor from the University of British Columbia, created an assignment where his students added content to pre-existing Latin American literature entries on Wikipedia and even created new ones ("WikiProject murder madness and mayhem," 2015). At the end of the project, students had produced three featured articles, as well as eight good articles.

• Rajiv Jhangiani from Kwantlen Polytechnic University created an assignment where he had students in his social psychology class develop multiple choice questions for the open textbook he was using in the course. The open textbook didn't have any test bank materials, and his class of 35 students ended up producing 1400 questions by the end of the semester (Jhangiani, 2017).

As you can see, there are a variety of ways to embed open pedagogy practice in your courses. You can start small, but eventually as you gain more comfort with this pedagogical approach you could eventually have your students work on revising and developing content for an open textbook!

References

• DeRosa, R. & Jhangiani, R.S. (2017). Open pedagogy. In A. Mays (Ed.), A guide to making open textbooks with students. Retrieved from https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/

• Hendricks, C. (2017, May 23). Navigating open pedagogy, part 2. Retrieved from http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2017/05/23/navigating-open-pedagogy-pt2/

• Jhangiani, R. (2017, January 12). Why have students answer questions when they can write them? Retrieved from http://thatpsychprof.com/why-have-students-answer-questions-when-they-can-write-them/

• Jhangiani, R. S. & Jhangiani, S. (2017). Investigating the perceptions, use, and impact of open textbooks: A survey of post-secondary students in British Columbia. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(4). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i4.3012 

• WikiProject murder madness and mayhem. (2015). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Murder_Madness_and_Mayhem

• Sheridan, V. (2017, August 9). A pedagogical endeavor. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/08/09/robin-derosas-oer-pedagogical-endeavor

• Wiley, D. (2013, October 21). What is open pedagogy. Retrieved from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975

• Wiley, D. (2017a, April 4). How is open pedagogy different? Retrieved from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/4943

• Wiley, D. (2017b, May 2). OER-enabled pedagogy. Retrieved from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5009

This blog post, authored by Stephanie Quail,

is  available under a CC BY 4.0 international license