Open Pedagogy

Here are 9 questions from A Guide to Making Open Textbook with Students about licensing you should keep in mind when planning how you're going to handle an open pedagogy assignment:

1. Can Students in your class project choose whether to openly license their work or not?
2. What implications might this have for the usability of the completed work?
3. If they do choose an open license, can they choose which license to use?
4. If they choose a restrictive license, will their contributions still be part of the finished book?
5. Do all the students have to come to a consensus, or can they choose the license for their individual contributions? What is the decision process when there are small-group contributions?
6. How do students want to be cited and attributed in their work and future derivatives?
7. What if they do not want to be cited at all and prefer to be anonymous or keep their work private?
8. How can students use the work in their portfolios or professional websites, if desired?
9. How will you take advantage of this topic to teach digital literacy to students around the concept of openness?

A Guide to Making Open Textbook with Students by Rebus Community

Students' work belongs to them first and foremost. Thus, students should be in charge of deciding how they are credited and how their work gets distributed.

Opening up education and extending engagement with communities beyond the classroom does have its potential threats, ranging from surveillance capitalism to digital redlining. It's important to discuss with students the benefits as well as the dangers and all of the complexities involved in entering a digital space. A crucial step in any open pedagogy environment is to promote information literacy and to respect students' individual decisions not to be credited, not to be published, or to use a pseudonym. Likewise, it is crucial that students choose how they wish to license their work, taking into consideration the potential scope of their project's reach.

A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students has a list of ways to protect students' federally mandated rights when openly publishing their work.

1. Get FERPA waivers from the students.
2. Make the open resource and credit the students who contributed, but without identifying that they were part of a specific course.
3. Allow students to use pseudonyms when building the open resource.
4. All of the above.

A Guide to Making Open Textbook with Students by Rebus Community

Cultivating an informed open pedagogy also means having a conversation about the different kinds of Creative Commons licenses that are available to them.There are many reasons students may want to limit how their texts are published. For example, students may want to use a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA) because they don't like the idea of someone potentially profiting off of their work.

For more information about Creative Commons, see HSU's Creative Commons Research Guide.