Before jumping in with open pedagogy, you should keep in mind how you will support students through the changes you plan to make. Ward (2017) discussed some of these considerations in an interview with Rajiv Jhangiani, a leader in the field of open pedagogy:

“When taking that approach, [Rajiv] said, it is important to give students control over their work. Let them choose Creative Commons licenses they are comfortable with. Allow them to later remove online work they decide is inferior. At the same time, scaffold assignments so that students gradually build skills and improve their ability to produce high-quality work.”^[1]

If you are interested in utilizing open pedagogy in your courses, first consider how this will affect your students.^[2]

Acknowledge the Risk

Working in the open and opening up our work to the public can be scary for almost all of us but doing so usually means it pushes us to a higher standard of work. Learning involves risk taking. When students share their work openly, they are contributing to the building and sharing of knowledge and they are opening up their work for public review. When you are accustomed to learning and creating behind classroom walls and for the eyes of only your instructor, working in the open can be both daunting and extremely rewarding. Students will want to understand:

• How their work may be evaluated by others?
• What their obligations are regarding copyright and appropriate citation of others’ work?
• How they can license their own work (with an open license) to allow others to re-use and build on their work – while attributing them as the original author?

When sharing content outside of traditional classrooms, different people have different levels of comfort and risk and doing so may require grappling with issues of trust, privacy and ownership.  Addressing such questions directly, even building them into course discussions, can help students understand why they are being asked to work openly as well as help to build their buy-in and support for doing so.

Understand your tools

You don’t have to use a snazzy tool or technology to make open pedagogy work. Make sure that you are choosing a tool or technology that your students can easily learn and– if it is not already familiar to them– that you have included time in your course for teaching students how to use your chosen tool.

Scaffold learning

Not all students will be familiar with technology or able to engage with OER quickly. It’s important that you scaffold technology support into your teaching so all students can be on the same page when it comes to using the tools you’ve created or adopted.^[3]

Some methods for scaffolding learning are provided below:

• Integrate interactive exercises into your class to help students work through new concepts.
• Create tutorials on how to use any technology or tool unique to your class.
• Use blogs and discussion posts to introduce the concept of writing for a public audience.
• Give students the choice between set assignment types to accommodate learners with different technical competencies.

Educate students about ownership rights and copyright

 It’s important that students who are creating items that might be published and shared openly can understand what that means. At SAIT, student produced work is governed by policy that clearly defines students’ rights. If you’re uncomfortable about discussing copyright and ownership rights with your students, librarians or the copyright officer can support you in developing learning materials or discussions on the topic.

Be considerate of student privacy

Some students will be energized by the idea that their homework can be seen, used, or even improved upon by future students in the class. Others may feel uncomfortable with this step. Allow students to opt out of making their materials public if they are uncertain about doing so and give them the option to remove their name from public documents if they are uncertain about this for any reason.

Assessment for OER

Assessment for courses utilizing OER does not have to be any different than for courses utilizing traditional materials. Nonetheless, some individuals have developed assessment techniques for the open classroom in particular. One of these is the RISE Framework.

The RISE Framework (Resource Inspection, Selection, and Enhancement) utilizes a 2 x 2 matrix of High Grade/Low Grade and High Use/Low Use to determine how much the use of OER has affected a student’s learning outcomes.^[4] The RISE Framework is used to determine how well a student performed in a course and to contrast that outcome with how much they used their provided course materials. This method can help delineate between students who excel in a subject by default and those who have done well in a course thanks to the use of the provided course content. A package in R has been developed for running a RISE analysis quickly and easily. The RISE package for R (external link) is openly available in Zenodo.

In the end, what assessment techniques you employ in your course will be determined by a variety of factors, some of which will be out of your control. Nonetheless, it’s important to understand why you’re assessing your course and the impact that assessment can have, particularly for courses changing their materials.

These are only a few concepts to keep in mind when exploring open pedagogy in your course. You can learn more about this topic in the Open Pedagogy Notebook.