5 A Recipe for Open Educational Practices
Lauren Ray
Recipe Background
In my role supporting Open Education at the University of Washington, I have seen a growth in instructor interest in incorporating open educational practices, also known as open pedagogy, into their curriculum. Open pedagogy is a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate understanding through the act of creation, and in which their creations are openly licensed so that they may live on outside the classroom in a way that has an impact on the greater community[1].
Some examples of Open Pedagogy are:
- Students contribute to the creation of an open textbook that is then revised and built upon by students in future courses.
- Students create and/or edit Wikipedia articles to improve content coverage and quality in a subject area.
- Students design tests that are used to assess comprehension of course materials.
- Students edit and revise the syllabus for a course.
- Students create and publish a zine or e-book to discuss a theory, concept, explore research topics or provide practical guidance on a topic.
I most often see an interest from instructors who want to transform a “disposable” writing assignment into a “renewable” one in which student work will be published online and have value outside of the course. At the University of Washington, we provide access to the Pressbooks platform, and I regularly provide workshops and outreach to promote these platforms for instructors and students to use in creating open course materials.
Instructors appreciate that Pressbooks is an easy-to-use authoring platform with numerous existing examples of student-authored works. They are excited by the prospect of utilizing their classroom as an opportunity engage students with online publishing. Instructors have a sense that they’d like their students to understand something about copyright in the process, and to get help from the libraries in teaching their students a new digital publishing tool. When consulting with instructors, I try to better understand their course goals, learning objectives and we work together to redesign their assignment with an open publishing element. For my recipe, I’d like to share elements that I’ve found make an open pedagogy project successful for instructors, students and librarians like myself who are providing support.
Ingredients
For instructors:
- Be intentional about the values of open pedagogy – connection, community and transparency- as you plan your assignment and present it to students. Rather than framing the project as a way to get students to “publish online” consider the skills that students will be learning in the process.
- Value student agency by avoiding pressuring students to publish openly. This may mean re-framing how you think about the final outcomes of the open pedagogy assignment. For instance, if many students opt out of having their work published, what will this look like and how will you adjust your expectations for t