Considerations for Using Open Pedagogy
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
- List three considerations to keep in mind before changing your teaching style.
- Explain why it is important to scaffold learning in open pedagogy courses.
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 exerci