Free access to materials is not the only benefit provided by using OER. Another aspect of OER that is commonly commended by instructors is the academic freedom that using openly-licensed content affords them in taking control of their classroom and engaging students in learning.

Attribution: “Open Dialogues: How to engage and support students in open pedagogies” by Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia is licensed CC BY 3.0.

Innovation in the Classroom

The open licenses on OER allow instructors to adapt and integrate materials into their classes in new ways, incorporating topics of local interest or translating content into another language. Instructors who teach graduate level courses or courses in niche subject areas are often drawn to OER for two reasons:

1. They can adapt existing materials to meet the specific needs of their class.
2. They can share created materials with other instructors in their subject area around the world.

Developing new open educational resources can be incredibly impactful, especially for instructors who feel they are underserved by the traditional textbook model and market.

Open Pedagogy

Using open educational resources in the classroom can make it easier for students to access and interact with course materials. However, another major aspect of Open Education asks not “what you teach with” but “how you teach.” The set of pedagogical practices that include engaging students in content creation and making learning accessible is known as open pedagogy.

As DeRosa & Jhangiani (2017) explain, “one key component of open pedagogy might be that it sees access, broadly writ, as fundamental to learning and to teaching, and agency as an important way of broadening that access.”^[1] DeRosa & Robison (2017) expand on this topic further, explaining that:

“students asked to interact with OER become part of a wider public of developers, much like an open-source community. We can capitalize on this relationship between enrolled students and a broader public by drawing in wider communities of learners and expertise to help our students find relevance in their work, situate their ideas into key contexts, and contribute to the public good.”^[2]

Depending on the source you consult, open pedagogy might be a series of practices, a learning style, or a state of mind. For the sake of this chapter, open pedagogy is defined as a series of practices which involve engaging students in a course through the development, adaptation, or use of open educational resources.

Features and Attributes of Open Pedagogy^[3]

Tom Woodward highlights three features of open pedagogy in the article, Open Pedagogy: Connection, Community, and Transparency^[4]:

• open planning: Prior to the start of a course built on open pedagogy there is a focus on collaboration regarding what the course might be — the content, the lessons, the tools of construction, and the teaching strategies…You can see what other instructors have done — their resources, their lessons, or their reflections on what happened during their course. As Tom points out, these processes are often hidden from public view. Making them open and accessible means that others can learn from them.
• open products: Students are publishing for an audience greater than their instructor. That matters. Their work, being open, has the potential to be used for something larger than the course itself and to be part of a larger global conversation. This changes the experience of doing the work, but just as importantly it changes the kind of work you ask students to do.
• open reflection: After the course, reflecting and documenting how the course went is valuable both to the instructor and to those who might be considering similar courses or pedagogical strategies. People are happy enough to present and document success but it’s still not common practice to reflect on elements that don’t work well. Documenting reflections on what worked and what didn’t and making that public can lead to connections between people working to address the same challenges.

One could also consider a fourth feature:

• open process (of creating OER): If you or your students create open educational resources for a course, it’s useful to share not just the finished resources but also the processes of creating them. Sharing the process can mean many things, e.g., talking about how you made a teaching resource such as a video or podcast (what tools, software, what steps you took, pitfalls you ran into), describing why you created the resource in the way you did (what goals you had, what research underlies the creation of this resource), explaining how you have used the resource in a class and whether it was successful.

Scenario – Engaging Students Through Open Work
Let’s consider this scenario: In Dr. Smith’s course on forest conservation, they have been asking students to research forest conservation policies in a specific region, critically evaluate the policies, and then write a seven to ten-page essay on the topic. Students seem to have a hard time engaging with the assignment and, in feedback, students have noted that the assignment is both hard but also that it feels like it is busy work. Dr. Smith feels like the assignment is valuable as it gets students to think critically about the topic of the class. More so, they feel like the work the students do has potential as scholarly work and are thinking about having students post their essays on a course website or blog.

• How would posting the work on the Internet change the nature of the assignment?
• What strategies or scaffolding could Dr. Smith incorporate into the assignment to ensure that the students are successful?
• What might be the benefits or drawbacks of asking students to assign an open licence to this work?

Creating OER with Students

One method of engaging in open pedagogy is the development of renewable assignments, assignments which students create for the purpose of sharing and releasing as OER. These can range in content from individual writing assignments in Wikipedia to collaboratively-written textbooks. David Wiley has argued^[5] that much of student work can be considered disposable:

“These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world.”

Christina Hendricks, on the other hand, states^[6] that it’s not that such assignments have no value at all. They can often serve very well to encourage students to learn and apply information, gain research and other skills, engage in problem-solving, and more. If done well, they can show instructors the level of mastery students have achieved. But what is important to consider, is that “disposable assignments” don’t provide any further value to the world after they’re completed.

What makes an assignment renewable or disposable? A disposable assignment, Wiley suggests^[7], is any assignment about which students and faculty understand the following:

• Students will do the work
• Faculty will grade the work
• Students will throw away the work

However, a renewable assignment is any assignment where:

• Students will do the work
• Faculty will grade the work
• The work is inherently valuable to someone beyond the class
• The work is openly published so those other people can find and use it

Wiley later expanded his definition of assignments to include disposable, authentic, constructionist, and renewable assignments.  Wiley & Hilton (2018) compiled the criteria in Table 2 to distinguish between these different kinds of assignments, from least to most open.^[8]

There are many ways to get students involved in the creation and adaptation of OER. Assigning students to draft exam questions could bring immense value to your course, especially if those questions are built upon and improved by future students. Other work your students can collaborate on creating include literature reviews, course readers, and even full textbooks.^[9]

Although your students may be new to some of the content covered in your course, if they can be engaged in creating something useful for future students, they may be able to better understand the material through this process; furthermore, students may find it easier to convey your course material in a way that other students will be able to understand. How and if you choose to include your students in content creation is up to you as the instructor, but there are many options available. You can explore more examples of open pedagogy in action in the Open Pedagogy Notebook.

Tools for implementing renewable assignments

• Hypothes.is: One of the tools commonly used for open pedagogy projects is Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is allows users to annotate websites and online readings easily. Using hypothes.is can let students engage with your course readings and each other in a more interactive way than discussion boards might allow.
• Wikibooks: Wikibooks and WikiEdu are both excellent tools for working with students to create a text. Alternatively, short student projects, such as annotated bibliographies, can be done via Wikipedia by adding context and citations to short or underdeveloped articles. This not only gives students the opportunity to get experience explaining concepts for a public audience, it also increases the available public knowledge on your course’s topic!
• Google Drive: Google Drive provides a variety of tools that can be used for collaboration on text-based projects as well as slideshows and spreadsheets.
• Youtube: Student-made instructional videos or class projects can be incredibly useful to showcase for future students in the class or to use as supplemental materials for explaining difficult concepts.