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Whether you are knee-deep in your project or just in the planning stages, the following modules will help you determine the scope of your work. While it is tempting to jump ahead and plan out what you and the students you’re working with will be doing, your open pedagogy project will be much more successful if you address these critical questions first.
This workshop purposefully begins by having you scope your values and goals (Module A1) and then your capacity (Module A2) before you scope your project (Module A3), as both A1 and A2 are crucial for determining that scope. We’re asking you to put aside the what of your project and reflect on the why.
As you think about your values and goals, we ask you to start this process by considering how your project can center diversity, equity, and inclusion. One of the hallmarks of open education is that it prioritizes access. When materials are both available and free, student access barriers are removed. Open pedagogy also centers access, but in a way that prioritizes student access to participatory knowledge creation. When we invite students to bring the whole of themselves to creating or modifying course content, course content will inevitably be changed to reflect the diversity and complexity of student identities.
Module A1: Scoping Your Values and Goals
Open pedagogy projects may be one-time assignments constrained to a single course or much more complex multi-year undertakings involving multiple stakeholders in various capacities. Regardless of the scope, though, revising or creating new assignments takes time; honestly, assessing your time is crucial. Before determining the scope of your project, it’s essential for its success that you scope your own capacity and the capacity of your collaborators if you have them.
However, the affordances of open education and the rights that come with openly licensed resources mean that you do not always need to start from scratch. Perhaps you found some projects that you could revise or build off of in the case studies section, or you know of existing projects in your discipline that are openly licensed. Likewise, you may discover potential collaborators and possible mentors as you research open pedagogy examples, or you might even discover colleagues working on similar projects in your departments or institutions or by putting out a call on social media or Twitter.
Module A2: Scoping Your Capacity
Now that you’ve described your values and goals and determined your capacity for your open pedagogy project, it’s time to define the scope of your project. Think of this as your lede: the what, when, how, and where of what you’ll be doing with students. While this may seem like a simple request, open pedagogy projects can range from a one-time, one-semester Wikipedia editing assignment to a multi-semester, hundreds-of-students textbook creation project with many other options in between.
You may have come to this workshop with a precise idea in mind, or you may be coming up with many ideas. Any idea is fair game for this Roadmap, but we suggest you choose one for this workshop. Look back at the scope of your values, goals, and capacity and determine what is both realistic and possible and answer the questions below with that in mind.
Module A3: Scoping Your Project
"The Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap" by Christina Riehman-Murphym and Bryan McGeary is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.