Open Pedagogy

"Open pedagogy allows students to engage in higher-order thinking tasks from Bloom's (1956) taxonomy, such as analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Open pedagogy also provides students the opportunity to take part in significant learning experiences, especially in terms of how to learn, integration of knowledge, caring, and the human dimension as described in Fink's (2013) "Taxonomy of Significant Learning."
 Open Pedagogy Approaches

Spectrum of Open Practice by Cindy Underhill.

Adoption (Low Touch)

• Definition: Adoption (without alteration) of freely accessible text or resource in one or more course section. Usually replaces publisher's text. May include curation of varied media (i.e. video, text, data) to support learning.
• Access/re-use: Resources may or may not be openly licensed. License (or lack of) determines re-use permission. No strategy for access of materials beyond course participants.
• Impact: Cost is lowered for students. Barriers to access (learning materials) is lowered.

Adaption (Medium Touch)

• Definition: Alteration or adaption of open texts or resources to add to context or improve for local use. Adaptations may include the work of students (remixes, etc.)
• Access/re-use: Remixed or adapted open resources must be licensed and re-published according to the terms of re-use outlined by the original source. Strategy for access (including publishing & licensing) is employed.
• Impact: Cost is lowered for students. Time cost may be high if adaptions are extensive or if remix is required course component. Digital literacies developed.

Creation (High Touch)

• Definition: The work of the course (or portion of the course) is public. Students re producers of open education resources and are engaged in publishing and (perhaps) licensing their work.
• Access/re-use: Students and instructors are contributing to openly accessible and licensed resources in a subject/field. Experts outside the course environment may be collaborating. Goals for public contribution are aligned with learning objectives.
• Impact: Time costs are high for both instructors and students. Students engaged in authentic knowledge production and publication. Digital literacies and scholarly approaches engaged.

Connection (High Touch)

• Definition: Connection is the application of open practice. Faculty and students are documenting and sharing their processes and reflections and engaging with open communities.
• Access/re-use: Students and instructors are engaging with public, networked communities for the purpose of teaching, learning, and research. Students and instructors are co-creators and the products of the course are open for the public.
• Impact: Time costs are high for both instructors and students as they negotiate the shifts involved in moving from private to public, consumer to producer, contributor to collaborator. Building social, scholarly practices.

1. There's a greater sense of community involvement as students communicate and work together.
2. The students can draw upon the unique knowledges they bring to each class—this includes information and skills that professors might not have as well.
   • This makes it possible to touch on subjects that professors might not be able to themselves or might not have considered.
3. The result is a body of work diverse in language and approach (being less uniform can be a weakness, but it can also be a strength).
4. It allows students to be creative.
5. It's a big responsibility, which helps students feel like they're being taken seriously. It helps them enter the conversations in their respective fields of study.
   • On that same note, it lets students feel like a part of their communities. Depending on the project, this could be their local communities, or it could be their wider academic communities.
6. Students can collaborate and work with other professionals in the field.

by Cole Shepard

Disposable Assignments
Most traditional assignments are considered disposable. Any assignment that ends when it's turned into the teacher for credit counts as disposable.

Authentic Assignments
Authentic assignments are assignments that continue to be useful after they're turned in. Constructionist and renewable assignments both count as authentic assignments. What makes something specifically just an authentic assignment is if its use stays in the classroom.

Constructionist Assignments

An assignment is a constructionist assignment and not just an authentic assignment when its use extends to the public sphere. You could call most thesis papers published through HSU Press constructionist assignments.

Renewable Assignments

Renewable assignments are assignments that are share publicly but are also published with an open license. This means that the students' work can be used, edited, and remixed by other students or other scholars. Renewable assignments can be artifacts created by students or can be openly licensed material that the students edit and remix like Wikipedia.

Renewable Assignment Design Framework by Stacy Katz and Jennifer Van Allen

Step 1: Analyze and Classify Current Assignments

Ask yourself some questions about what you're currently assigning. Are you having students make something new? Are you having them revise/remix something else like OER? Does your students' work have value beyond facilitating their learning? Do students have the opportunity to share their new work? What about license it openly so that others may revise/remix their work in turn?

Step 2: Consider Meaningful OER Contributions

This means considering the ways your assignments may impact the world at large. Do you stop at having it impact future students (i.e. by having your students create questions that may be on future tests in future classes?), or does your assignment contribute to the wider learning community (i.e. by having your students edit Wikipedia or create a literature anthology)?

Step 3: Select Tools and Repositories
Consider both student access and public access when choosing which tools/repositories to learn how to use. Also consider how much work it may take for students to understand the tools you expect them to use. Be cognizant of how much class-time might be taken up by tutorials. For this (and all other) step(s), a librarian might be able to help you decide what might best suit your assignment's and your students' needs.
Some suggested resources:
CUNY Academic Commons: WordPress Instance
CUNY OER Commons: OER instructional material
CUNY Academic Works: institutional repository
Manifold: collaborative publishing platform

Step 4: Design Intentional Negotiations for Openness

There are a couple key things to consider when publishing your students' work, and the first big one is licensing. It's important to both brush yourself up on and then brush your students up on the different kinds of creative commons licenses that are available. It's also crucial that you give your students the option not to share if they don't feel comfortable with it (or to limit their licensing in some way). In order to accommodate the needs of all your students, you should let them choose what kind of relationship their work has with the outside world. to this aim, it's also a good idea to discuss the scope of your assignment's intended audience: is it macro, meso, micro, or nano? This essentially means the difference between sharing your work globally, within a specific community, with an individual, or in a brief interaction.

Step 5: Finalize and Reclassify Assignments

This step goes exactly as one would expect: you go over your rubric and design your assignment while keeping in mind how your students might approach it for the first time, then you meet with a librarian one last time for a final review, at which point, you can safely call your assignment renewable!