Allowing students to create, revise, or modify openly licensed content can help engage them in the learning process. This session explores various ways student collaboration with open pedagogy can impact and inform curriculum decisions and improve learner success in the digital classroom.
Topic of the Session/Relevance to Community
Open Educational Resources have been increasingly used with success in higher education, but students’ awareness of how these resources can be used or modified by learners, like themselves, is limited. Likewise, many educators do not tie end of course evaluations to specific suggestions about how to improve open content being used in their course, missing the opportunity to truly engage students as both editors and content creators in much of the course design. While it is necessary to have content experts carefully select and curate open content used in courses, student users should also be presented with the option to add their voice and experience to how effective the content was to their learning and be encouraged to offer structured modifications. This opportunity not only represents the ability for a student to offer authentic evaluation on the open nature of the course but to also give them agency in the development of helpful assignments, activities, and readings for future students.
During this session, I will discuss how my first-year writing students used such an opportunity in my Spring 2019 Writ 102 Online course to develop an open-pedagogy assignment. Students worked in groups of two or three to evaluate aspects of open resources within our course for its effectiveness, choosing to either discuss how an existing open reading, assignment, or activity was helpful to their learning or actively suggesting modifications or additions to an open resource to help future students with their learning. Attendees will be shown multiple student examples of open-pedagogy presentations published by students under a creative commons license.
Session Level/Engagement:
This session will use Sutori as the primary presentation mode and is designed to be more interactive than a standard lecture. During the session, individuals will be invited to participate in the presentation using a built-in forum feature in Sutori and also take part in several embed polls to assess individual knowledge of open-pedagogy. Additionally, the session will also have its own Flipgrid page to further continue the discussion among individuals beyond the actual session.
Session Goals
Attendees will:
- View a number of student-generated open-pedagogy assignments that showcase how learners can use their imagination to modify existing open course materials
- Understand how to approach college-aged students in discussions about creative commons licensing and why open-pedagogy matters to them
- Explore multimodal strategies and techniques used to create open-pedagogy assignments
- Examine issues of agency and power dynamics between faculty and students and how open-pedagogy creates a more equitable relationship between student and teacher