Watch the video below, in which Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani introduce the idea of open pedagogy. The video is about one hour in length. The first three minutes are an introduction to the webinar series; you can fast forward to 3:12 if you would like to skip that part. If you’d like, you can also read this introduction to open pedagogy.
In the comments section below:
- Tell us what jazzes you about open pedagogy. What confuses you?
- Write a paragraph describing open pedagogy to a colleague.
27 thoughts on “What is open pedagogy?”
As someone who utilized (or attempted to) an open pedagogical approach during the Spring 2019 semester, my experience had mixed results. What jazzed me then, and still does, is that it puts students in the front row of their learning. They may not be driving the car, but at least they’re not in the back seat as much. One student wrote to me afterwards:
Being in your PSY 200 class was a very . I learned so much about social psychology in this class. It was a great experience because you made us look for the information which made us. learn even more about our topic. Thank you for being a great professor and I want to wish you good luck with your research study.
However, at least one other student did not seem to appreciate this approach, especially since I chose not to utilize Blackboard, but rather opted for a class WordPress site:
So glad Im graduating! Prof. DC lectures heavily there are 5 exams a midterm and a final plus bi weekly blogs and two stupid extra credits. He has his own website that he wants you to use instead of blackboard. He keeps the class for the entire full 3 hours and still lectures when its time to leave. I would never recommend u 2 take his class!!!!!
So I guess what (still) confuses me is how to get most, if not all, of the class on-board with this approach- when perhaps they’re used to (and/or prefer) the traditional “way”.
This is how I described my approach to open pedagogy to my students in my Spring 2019 syllabi:
**This class will be PARTICIPATORY. That is, I participate and you participate. How will this happen? With my knowledge and your knowledge. Believe it or not, but you know a lot about stuff. And chances are, you already know something about Social Psychology. My job will be to help you get that stuff out, and organize it. As such, I will suggest ideas and materials to guide your thinking about Social Psychology, as you will be actively finding and selecting the topics and materials that YOU want to focus on.**
**Once we figure out which topics we’ll cover this semester (TBD on 2/6), we’ll team up in groups of 3-4 members. Each team member will be responsible for finding either a scientific journal article, website, and/or video, music, film, picture, or ‘other’, for the entire class to review. Your group will be responsible for uploading this material onto the class website, by every Wednesday. By the end of each class meeting, we all should know what materials to review for the next class.**
Dr. Caicedo,
Thank you for your post. I was having trouble figuring out how to respond to this question, and the approach you took here is a great springboard into what I’d like to contribute. Let the sharing begin!
Hi David, you are using a very interesting approach to teaching an OER course. I like that your students learn actively and, as you mentioned, “put in the front row of their learning.” It is a challenging task for some of the students who are used to passively receive information in the form of lectures and readings, and are used to being tested on how well they can retained the information. Everyone is different and I doubt that there is a way to please all your students. Those who do are usually entertaining performers, not necessarily great professors.
I’m excited about potentials I hadn’t considered before for my online classes, especially in terms of student co-creation with respect to both academic content and interpersonal support. I love the idea of having students contribute to a living textbook that gives them shared authorship of a subject while connecting them with learners who will come after them. I’m also intrigued by the idea of an even more open approach, such as was mentioned in the seminar; for example, many of my students are from immigrant families and are the first to attend college, and I think it might be transformational to allow family members to participate in our course. What confuses me still is how to harness the many resources available. I’m also unsure how some of these wonderful idea of openness synch with college requirements and existing learning systems, such as Blackboard.
I would describe open pedagogy to a colleague as a way of expanding the existing educational model beyond the stricture of textbooks and traditional learning systems to a far more creative one in which learners take ownership of the process. This ownership includes co-creation of material, establishment of a personal learner identity, and contribution to the educational community beyond themselves.
Open pedagogy is about access on multiple levels. It came about in the broader context of the UNs Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26, stating “everyone has the right to education.” But in a world of increasingly costly college tuition, barriers to access to knowledge are mounting. One thing we can do is make it so our students don’t have to buy books. This isn’t about saving money, though that is a benefit as many first-generation students especially don’t budget for books in their expenses. It is about expanding access to knowledge and enhancing the learning experience at the same time. When students do not have to purchase a textbook or accesscode, D/F/W rates among minority students drop by one third. This has broader social justice implications. It fosters a different orientation to academia that is intrinsically linked to access, not elitism. It allows us to think about access and what impedes access to knowledge more broadly. In open pedagogy, students do not just download or receive materials. They create them! They learn to participate in the creation, revision, expansion of knowledge to shape markets they are growing into. They also learn about copyright and becoming agents of their own learning. We move from a content focus to a community focus. So we focus on creating policies with our students that increase access, going so far as to rethink our SLOs. We create no disposable assignments — everything should be sharable with a broader audience, thus remaining open. Assignments should not be hoops to jump through but meaningful contributions relevant to the learner’s life which provides the tools to reduce the harm they will experience in the world. Do no harm. Have dialogue. Transform knowledge. ALL of this excites me.
What I like about open pedagogy is that it allows for creativity. I wouldn’t say that there is anything that I am confused by, however, I would like to know my “limits.” What can I not do when using open pedagogy?
Open Pedagogy is both the instructor and student collaborating in the classroom. It allows for the student to be more engaged and not feel as though all of the “power” is in the hands of the professor. The students can choose what they want to learn and how they want to learn it.
What is there not to like about sharing? The thing I like the most about open pedagogy is that everything is visible and everything is shared. First of all, I teach English 201 and English 314, and both are very heavy on the reading. Textbooks can cost an arm and a leg; however, as the video pointed out, literature published before 1923 is public domain. So, most–if not all–of the texts I teach are public domain, and therefore, students really don’t need to buy any textbooks, and they obviously like this aspect of the class. In addition, the students have no excuse in regards to reading the texts. They have access to it on their tablets, printed out, or even on their phone; they learn early on that they must read the texts. They might not like that aspect, but I do! So, this is what we would call as win-win situation–students have easy access to the readings and the assignments and both students and teachers benefit greatly from that situation.
What confuses me just a bit is that supplemental material that you might find in a textbook–for example a Norton Critical Edition of a novel–is not so easy put together or accessed. I find myself have to “Frankenstein” together different essays, maps, paintings, and historical context, from various books to give to my students. I would like to find an easier way.
Open pedagogy is about sharing knowledge, sharing texts, and allowing the students to really feel involved in the academic process. Academia is not necessarily restricted to the “elite,” but rather, should be an exchange of ideas. When you have an entire class available on a WordPress site then that knowledge is there and–as stated in the video–is not erased the next semester. The students are not only sharing their knowledge with the class but also with me. I always remind my students that they teach me stuff as well. They might be able to see something in a story that I have never noticed before, and by sharing their ideas to the website it is indeed “published.” Students shouldn’t be far removed from the learning process but a part of it completely and open pedagogy allows this.
What I love most open OER and open pedagogy is that the students can learn without placing more financial burden upon them. There is a vast amount of free resources to use and I enjoy creating my own when I find that there is something missing that I wish to add in my own courses. What confuses me a bit is if there is a way to check on the information that is out there to use – if the information is kept up to date and is completely accurate. It would be amazing to get the students involved in creating the resources and helping to edit them and make them accessible/clear for everyone. Their feedback can help to tailor a course that is fun, informative and insightful, and also meaningful for them as they will help create and tweak the resources we use.
I love the idea of Open Pedagogy for many reasons, and reducing cost for students is one of them. As one of the speakers mentioned, giving students access to knowledge is a priority here. What excites me about the project is building a course that allows students to participate in creating course materials. This, I think, can be an empowering experience for both the students and for the professor. I’ve done some of this in previous semesters, but I’d like to get more creative with course activities and assignments. The idea presented in the video, of students creating a literary anthology, is amazing. I wonder what I can do in my class that will similarly encourage students to contribute to my class. The big questions here are: how can I create meaningful, rigorous and relevant assignments that ask students to actively participate and to contribute? The good news is that, because OER materials are so fluid, I can revise course tasks each semester, including during the semester (if something isn’t working well, for example). I want my students to feel that what they are learning in my Critical Thinking class has value beyond the course itself. Now off to work!
One of the things that excites me most about open pedagogy is the idea that we are putting emphasis on what access to knowledge might truly mean. We are asked as educators to be conscious of all of the possible barriers to learning that students often face. The grounding in equity seems incredibly important. I also am very drawn to the notion that open pedagogy challenges those who teach to be open to new ideas, new pedagogical approaches. Rajiv mentioned that teaching through the open pedagogical approach fosters imagination and helps us to not be “static” in our teaching methods and resources. I find this wonderful for both students and teachers.
I would describe open pedagogy as a system of learning that encourages collaboration between students and teachers as well as among teachers alone. Open pedagogy is a way that educators can publicly share their work, use others’ work, and involve their students in the creation of resources. Open pedagogy encourages us to think about what others are doing, to look at learning as something that can take place outside of the classroom and, furthermore, that connects us with our communities and the public.
I once defined OER to a friend, a fellow professor who teaches philosophy at a community college in Boston. She became very upset and angry at the idea, pointing out that this will put so many people in academia out of work. “Writers and editors and publishers need to make a living, too, you know,” which gave me pause. I don’t remember what I said in response, but wish I knew the stat Rajiv mentioned in the video about the astronomical increase in textbook prices.
I also teach at BCC, where the unspoken culture of the Eng Dept is unofficially ZTC because all professors photocopy excerpts and hand out packets to their students on the first class. They’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. When I asked someone, they simply replied, “Students just won’t buy textbooks. If we want them to read, we have to give them the material.” This drives home the point made in the video, that students worry more about the cost of books than anything else.
At BMCC I have the excerpt of the formal definition of what it is as part of my syllabus, and when I go into a long explanation of it, the students respond rather lukewarmly, and perk up a little when I say, “long story short, we know how much textbooks cost, and want to save you money,” and because I like to inject humor whenever I can, I just say, “You’re welcome!” But beyond that, they still seem unimpressed by it. Since the fall of 2017, I’ve only had one comment on student feedback expressing appreciation about it. At other times, I’ve actually gotten the feeling that it leaves students confused about what to print out and when. I’ve gotten a vibe that some students would prefer a traditional textbook where everything is in one place.
And speaking of that, this is somewhat tangential to the question, but it something that has posed the biggest challenge to me: using Blackboard and/or WordPress effectively in presenting the work to students so that it’s easy for them to locate the materials, assignments, where to submit their work, etc. etc. I think once I can get those logistical details straightened out, I can bring all my “syllabideas” to fruition.
In the video they talk about the Idea that OER is defined as a social justice matter, and that it’s revolutionary: I’m 100% behind that, but I wonder if 1. Our students feel that way, and 2. If they need to feel to that way in order for this movement to work.
The distinction for students might be subtle or completely lost. From what I can tell, they already think that if something is online it’s open access anyway. How do others show the difference, and show the importance of the difference?
I am jazzed about open pedagogy, especially as it relates to OER and eliminating textbook costs as an obstacle. A lot of time is lost during the first couple weeks of my courses by students trying to get the textbook and by me fielding emails from students who do not have the textbook and trying to assist them. I am excited at the thought of being able to have my students just get down to the business of learning. (Side note: I have at least 5 students in my current summer session class who have yet to acquire the text.) I am also intrigued by the idea of designing lesson plans that force me to rethink my current notions of what learning means.
I perceive open pedagogy as a pretty broad term comprising the concepts of open education, open (and hopefully equal!) access to materials, open resources, and open engagement. But what the hell does open mean? Well. . . essentially . . . not “closed”. I “happily” lifted the following from a blog I came across “Brain Storm in Progress, Thoughts on Open Pedagogy v. OER enabled Pedagogy” https://geoffcain.com/blog/open-education/thoughts-on-open-pedagogy-v-oer-enabled-pedagogy/: “Education is closed in the sense that it is expensive, classist, inaccessible, and strangled by corporations who define the curriculum with their “great” but expensive textbooks (or technologies). The closed classroom is hierarchical and led by an “expert” whose job is to transmit information to the empty vessels.”
Open pedagogy is a different way of engaging in the process of education. The concept of open pedagogy can be off-putting for some, because of its transformative nature. Professors are relieved of their role as the sole gatekeepers of knowledge. (Oh my!) Learning is (up)lifted from the restrictions of copyright and the monetization of education through the ever-rising cost of textbooks, as they are no longer the center of the educational universe. The process of learning is no longer static but becomes something more. It is undulating and alive.
I’m always excited and curious about anything that enhance student learning while saving them a buck or two. Open pedagogy is about creating opportunity for learners/students and facilitators/instructors to be on a. leveler playing field regarding textual material, access to this material and the approach as to how said material is used. I see Open Pedagogy as a platform and space to be part of an ever-changing continuum of definitions as to what it actually is or wants to become. Like the teaching tools and strategies we all employ as instructors needs updating occasionally so will the term OER require our constant attention as to where it can go and needs to go as we shape curriculum and lessons. I’m not sure if confusion is what I feel when I think of some of issues or challenges with the concept of OER. However, I will admit to a lethargy and unwillingness to change and update methods that require more learning and openness on my part to include technology. I think because much of the training for my disciplines in the theatre call for a fact to face, visceral, and literal inter-personal communicative style I have an initial skepticism towards putting the work I feel is needed to be “up-to-date.” I am changing hence my participation in this forum, and I believe my insecurities, born mostly out of ignorance and fear will continue to lessen as I realize how much of that attitude mirrors some of the very students I interact with daily.
Have I had success with OER in my classes? Yes. From the point of view that the students are happy that they do not have to pay for a text. Now, it’s up to me to continue to work on ways of getting them to read it, and be open to more ways of empowering them to see the wider possibilities of OER in their practical lives.
Whenever I mention Open Pedagogy to colleagues at other institutions, they have no idea what it is. It is crucial that more and more professors be aware of what it is, and create more options for our students. The statement that sometimes kids drop out because they can not afford books is completely true. Before doing OER, thank goodness I always placed the books I was using in the library and encouraged those who could not afford it to just make copies. Now that I use OER, none of my students are behind with their readings. It is a win-win situation for all of us. I don’t understand why we don’t have ALL educators using it or advocating for more of it.
I’ve really liked the idea of OER ever since I heard about using free resources to help students learn. I’ve been doing it now for several semesters, but I have still found that many students do not engage with the texts that I post. Most likely, very few of them bought the textbook when I assigned one, and these days, the same number actually do the readings that I have curated. So I come to this with a slight sense of frustration, but also with a hopeful feeling. I want to restructure my course in many ways – I want to make it more intuitive for students. I want to allow them layers of engagement – from simple reading, to adding their own ideas, to engaging in a more scientific way. The other thing I am very excited about in Open Pedagogy is the idea of non-disposable, or meaningful, assignments. I think it must be frustrating for students to work hard on something that they turn in for credit and then never see again. Especially for students who go on to major in Health Education or Public Health, I want to give them something that they can start working with from the very first introduction class and that they can hone while their understanding of the field expands, to finish with a project at the end that they can present to the next college they go to or to a potential employer.
Open Pedagogy is a way to fully engage students in the creation of work that is meaningful to them personally and to the community at large. It can be something that adds to the science in the field, it can be something that fulfills a social justice aim, or it can be something that is meaningful for students in their own or their family’s lives.
When considering the implementation of an open pedagogical approach in the classroom, I am enthusiastic about the transformative potential of engaging in this process. In particular, I am excited about moving from a student-centered to learner-driven model, where “learners” are more authentically engaged and involved in the academic process. Open pedagogy seems to be such a liberating approach not only for students, but also for faculty. It works to increase the transparency and purpose of assignments, collaboration between peers/learners, and that of faculty and learners, in addition to ensuring that assignments have a real and lasting impact for learners (and broader society), and giving voice and power to our student population. As highlighted in the assigned video, we now operate “classrooms of control.” We demand students to put away cell phones, close laptops, and only focus on us. Who are we? How are these actions benefiting students? What messages are we sending to our students? We’ve removed innovation and creativity from the very place in which it is sorely needed, classrooms of higher education. How can I teach about systems of oppression when I continue to perpetuate and support the operation of one?
In regard to confusion on the open pedagogical approach, the process seems to be clear, yet, the onboarding, prep, and maintenance of such a model for each class that takes place over the course of semester is a bit muddy. Some of the activities highlighted in the video segment definitely seem to require significant involvement of a consistent group of learners for a lengthy period of time. Also, how do we work to inform and persuade learners to actively participate in the creation of knowledge? When I’ve implemented exercises that require students to contribute to the classroom learning experience, they seem to be uninterested and even also consider it to be a move of inexperienced faculty.
Open pedagogy is a model that works to not only include but amplify the voice and perspective of learners by expanding access to create ongoing opportunities with lasting/meaningful impact for students (learners) to authentically engage in contributing to, informing, and collaborating with others to transform their educational experience. Such a process requires faculty to recognize the inequality that exists in our current educational systems/structure and the willingness to view students (learners) as partners or collaborators in the academic process.
I once was a CUNY student who had a hard time being able to afford textbooks. I used library copies, borrowed textbooks from my classmates or copied the chapters. However, in my Introduction to Psychology course, I use the publisher’s learning tool that requires paid access and students cannot get away without paying. I am well aware of financial and other struggles that students have to overcome to get their college degrees. At the same time, my job is to teach psychology and I have to make sure that I provide my students with high quality content and I spend as much of my time and energy so I can to do my job well. I have mixed feelings about requiring paid access codes but I will be requiring them until I can come up with a quality OER alternative that wouldn’t take all my time to create and maintain. One of the participants in the video mentioned that she finds it important to think about how her students pay for books, internet, food, etc. This is great but if I add this to my list of job responsibilities, the quality of my job would suffer or I would burn out and wouldn’t be able to do my job at all. The publisher provides me with high quality resources and customer support to resolve any potential technical issues. In my OER courses I have to do all that work and it is not the job that I was trained to do, just the same was as I was not trained to help my students deal with their day-to-day issues, and assuming this responsibility may hurt them more than help. I believe that it is important to recognize that both students and faculty require support. I am participating in this initiative because provides such support to faculty making the job of creating OER courses more manageable.
I think what excites me most about open pedagogy is that it is connected to my recent work and learning around OER and will allow me to build on some of the basic principles that I have attempted to integrate into my work. I am interested in the idea of a learner driven classroom. As someone who has always embraced the ideals of a student-centered classroom, the video that I viewed already has me thinking about ways I can push myself to have students engage with content more meaningfully by actually being part of creating it. Finally, I also appreciate the thinking about communities of possibilities as it relates to not only the development of the learning community in my classroom, but also to the learning community that exists in the world outside of the classroom.
If I were to explain open pedagogy to a colleague I would first discuss the importance of access to educational materials via OER and use that to begin a conversation about the value in a classroom environment that pushes students to create and share materials as part of the learning process.
Prior to teaching at BMCC, I never heard about the open pedagogy movement. However, throughout my teaching career, I always considered how expensive textbooks are and how at times they limit the critical conversations I am looking to engage students in during class. Even thinking about my own experience as an undergraduate and graduate student, the thought of purchasing a $200 dollar textbook made me cringe and for the most part, I did not purchase the textbook because I just could not afford it. So you can imagine how jazzed I was to learn about this whole Open pedagogical movement here at BMCC. I think what excites me the most about it is that students and I can build content together that we feel passionate about. Teaching criminal justice invokes several emotions during class discussions. I have had students say that they feel frustrated when they see videos on social media or watch documentaries. Now I can say, well we can do something about it. Use what you have read, learned, your experience and write a policy or think piece on how this impacts you and others. This will no longer be an assignment that only I will read, but it can be an assignment that can garner discussion with their peers and others who are looking at their writing. Also, there have been times that I have read things written in textbooks that at time sound biased and now us as a class we can possibly create our own chapter or textbook on a particular topic area. I find all of this exciting.
The licenses confuse me and also I am concerned about really shifting traditional learning styles for my students. For example: many of my students place such a hard core emphasis on testing and multiple choice that is mostly based on memorization so this shift in having them write and really be present in their learning will be an interesting journey. I would love to learn from others as to what they do to help foster this learning centered culture in the class without really making students too uncomfortable.
After watching this webinar I would tell fellow colleagues that are interested in learning about open pedagogy that open pedagogy allows students to be agents of their own education. It is a way to increase equity and ensure that access to education is created for all students despite financial barriers. Students can really be a part of their education because they are actively engaged in creating content or applying what they have learned. It requires innovation, creativity and labor on the part of the professor, but the outcome is a learning centered educational process that creates meaningful outcomes for students.
What confuses me:
-Where to look to see where others have taken open access thus far.
-I think I understand the various licenses for content, but applying it to my own course content gets a little fuzzy for me and I want to do it right!
I think I need a little guidance in terms of how to find open access essays to teach in my writing courses. I think I’m on board.
What jazzes me: Affordable accessible resources for my students jazzes me. If most students aren’t purchasing the text, then this is useful and in the best interest of the college.
Open access, sharing with colleagues jazzes me. I am particularly interested in collaborating with the work that other professors have created previously with an eye to adding to this repository of open access pedagogical content (assignments).
To me, open pedagogy allows students to learn the material outside of a pure lecturing format, which I suspect is not always effective when it comes to remembering the important information. The possibilities of students getting hands-on learning and doing research as part of their learning process excites me, since that is ultimately part of what I hope they will learn in class (research skills, writing skills, communication skills). The different suggestions about how to approach open pedagogy excites me and I look forward to trying it in my class.
Having worked closely with Jean Amaral, and my Criminal Justice colleagues to develop the ZTC degree in our program, I remain excited about the potential for open pedagogy to require and stimulate innovation and collaboration with faculty peers, making materials accessible (both through direct delivery and without cost) to students, who often struggle to afford the costs of survival in a City where almost half the residents are rent-burdened, and for the chance to decide for myself how best to deliver the content students will need to succeed in my courses and beyond. By and large, students are happy to know they have one less expense for the semester, but they have not yet had the opportunity, in my courses, to consider the benefit of seeing themselves as knowledge-creators, though I would very much like to redesign my courses to better meet that goal. I still struggle with the technical rules of what I can distribute, and for how long, and have not yet mastered all of the possible Creative Commons Licensing scenarios. I also wish I knew that I could develop my own resources and have them “count” as scholarship for promotion and tenure, and not only as pedagogical innovation. As I indicated above, I have not found the way to meet the potential of open pedagogy to shape my courses as more “learner-driven” (I did truly appreciate the distinction in the video here), but I am excited to work towards that goal, as well as excited to move outside of Blackboard, though I remain concerned about making sure students will be able to access our course information outside that platform. I am not so much confused as unsure how I could have students working on something much more “real” and “meaningful” in my courses (definitely goals for my own pedagogy and within my field), and still be able to get done everything I need to in a semester.
I have told colleagues that open pedagogy is a way to move away from using only proprietary content in a course, and towards curation of one’s own carefully-chosen, or even originally-created, materials, without violating copyright law, and without requiring students to pay for materials that they (and I) do not even really like. I use the example that when I first started teaching Corrections at BMCC, I reviewed 15 different textbooks. I found that only two of the 15 had an entry for race and ethnicity in their respective indices. As it is perfectly impossible to teach about the system of punishment for criminal law violations in the United States without reference to race and ethnicity, I saw immediately the potential for open educational resources to liberate me, and my students, from the hegemony of mainstream criminology and criminal justice scholarship. An added benefit is being able to confer with colleagues and share resources with each other.
Open pedagogy is dynamic, creative tools for activating students in the classroom and what I like about considering these tools for classroom learning is that it aligns well with my teaching philosophy for feature writing. A lot of the material I need to use for this kind of course exists in the public domain, and these resources and strategies have been a great education for me in my efforts to streamline the course to meet student skills and challenges. But I’m also relieved to hear from this video — supporting student work production/portfolio — by empowering students to use wordpress/web resources so that they’re work can live outside the school learning management system. Revision is such a crucial lesson for student writers , so any opportunity to empower them to see their work and monitor their own learning and growth seems is encouraged. I’ve already started to apply open pedagogy to my S19 classes, using hypothes.is , digitizing/hyperlinking/ making a dynamic syllabus that’s accessible beyond LMS which was deeply appreciated and useful to students. Collaboration and sharing is a value that is reflected in the profession of journalism which also aligns well with open pedagogy’s goals.
I’m feeling overwhelmed but excited. I stopped using a textbook for one of my courses a few years ago and the main reason for that was (as was mentioned in the video) the cost of textbooks to students. As it turned out, I really loved how engaged the students were with the readings I provided. It seems, though, that the goal here is to go beyond just providing open access materials. In thinking about creating a learner driven course, the flexibility implied in that is what makes me feel overwhelmed. I’m curious about what I can do to maintain the structure that I need to be effective as a teacher but also create a space for students to steer where we go during the semester. At the same time, it’s very exciting to think about how to create a classroom experience that really allows students to seek and select information within our topic of discussion (child psychology/developmental psychology) and use that to exchange information in a public space. I don’t see myself moving entirely beyond disposable assignments, though. While I like the idea of creating assignments that aren’t just for the instructor who reads/grades, I don’t think that every assignment needs to be for a public audience.
I am happy to take my understanding of OER from something that is more about student access up to another level (for me) — to something that is also student driven and connected. I’m also glad to read that there are faculty out there who have given a lot of thought to the question of what it means for student work or writing to be “public” because that is connected to what I have been thinking about for my future new assigments.
My original plan in signing up for this workshop was to develop a couple open pedagogy assignments for a new class I created this past year SOC 220 Art, Culture & Society. I was very excited about the thought of having students do something around public art. Unfortunately the CUNY bureaucracy moved at a speed slower than I had hoped and so I am unable to teach the course until Spring 2020. So I have two options – Intro to Sociology or our Sociology Capstone that I am teaching two sections of in the fall. Intro to Sociology is online and the Capstone has a major research project that demands a lot of feedback on student work, so I feel the need to be judicious in how I decide to use open pedagogy. I am sure I can incorporate it into either class, or both, but I want to think carefully about how I to do that.
However I decide to approach the new assignments, I believe it will make the course more dynamic and therefore memorable and more transformative for students. Open Pedagogy is part of OER, which stands for Open Education Resources. The word “Open” is meant in an number of ways – especially open in terms of the publishing license – open and available to be freely and without cost, used and remixed and shared. But Open Pedagogy is about more than just the material resources of textbooks, it is about sharing the work of the classroom learning experience – among students and among colleagues. It brings students into the process of course development, such as participating in syllabus construction, selecting materials based on their interests, or assignment development.
I think assignment development has the chance to be a really stealth way to push students critical thinking and deeper analytical thinking and I’m excited about that. When you plan an assignment you need to do a lot of reflection on what has come before, or what is going to come next, you have to design a platform on which connections can be made. And hopefully you could also figure out a way to make it fun and stimulating!
As an early childhood educator, one of the fundamental values that guides my work is the belief that every person is born striving to make sense of the world and that we are all highly capable of constructing knowledge. The idea that some people are “smarter” or “better” learners is deeply offensive to me. This premise is often used by those of us who work in education as an excuse to to abdicate our responsibility for creating the conditions in which people can learn. I am new to understanding what Open Pedagogy is, but the ways in which it seems this work aligns with the strength-based stance I take toward our students is what excites me the most.
I’m not sure I have confusion, but some wonderings about working with Open Pedagogy. First, there are my own limitations. I used to consider myself strong in using the tools of technology, but lately it all feels less and less intuitive to me. I’m hoping our work together will re-build my confidence and skills. I’m also left thinking about the work I will need to do to support our students when and if they face challenges in producing work that we feel ready to share more broadly. I’m excited about the possibility that, through using an open pedagogy approach, our ideas will have a wider audience and a practical application in the world (beyond receiving a grade for our class). I can only assume that making the work meaningful in this way will foster our engagement in the collective process of making knowledge together.
The most interesting take away from the open pedagogy seminar is that a course becomes “student-centered “or “learner-driven”. This paradigm shift in teaching allows students/learners to drive the car. While I may not be ready to hand over the keys right away, I do see value in sitting in the passenger seat. Learners have the potential for deeper engagement in the material while building community and making valuable contributions to the direction of the course. The seminar hosts talked about a sense of rigor and reciprocity that is brought about as the learners contribute and receive, contribute and receive. It’s probably important to keep in mind that while students take ownership of their learning, they only have a learner’s permit, the role of the instructor becomes even more important. The learning outcomes, OER material and course direction must be carefully curated by the professor. I am excited to implement open pedagogy.
My concerns have always been the difficulty in finding creative commons material.