Open Pedagogy encourages students to engage in experiential learning as both editors and content creators, offering students the chance to cocreate course materials for the benefit of future students.
With the onset of the pandemic, students not only experienced a rapid shift to online learning, but also a change in their sense of community. I revamped my hybrid online first-year writing courses by embedding video discussions from Flipgrid within Blackboard. In doing so these modifications not only helped students make the shift from in-person to online learning but also allowed them to engage in co-creating open pedagogy video assignments that fostered a sense of community within the course and beyond.
Design Structure
Students were able to redefine their sense of community and learning by using open pedagogy to collaborate and cocreate assignments on Blackboard using Flipgrid for the benefit of future students in the class. Since open pedagogy relies on the principle of shared learning, these videos were published under a CC-BY-SA license so that they could be used and remixed by anyone in their learning community. After the end of each module, I invited students to leave a video to a future student in the course offering advice about an assignment or strategy that was helpful to their learning. Once students completed their videos, I then curated them and embedded them into each weekly folder within Blackboard for the benefit of future students. Thus, each time a new weekly folder was opened, current students were able to view a number of short videos from previous writing students about what to expect from that week’s assignments and tips about how to be successful and at the end of the week were invited to continue the collaboration by leaving their own video to a future student in the course.
Additionally, students were able to work in groups to create longer, in-depth tutorials evaluating many of the assignments and software being used in our Blackboard course. These tutorials used student-created videos and an interactive presentation to create a showcase for the benefit of future students. Students not only evaluated software and assignments within the course but were also able to create tutorials about campus resources, like the writing center. Furthermore, students also used their own work in the class as artifacts to demonstrate how they applied the writing process to their own work.
Why it Matters
Implementing open pedagogy video assignments into first-year writing courses allowed for students to learn in innovative and collaborative ways during the pandemic and shows great promise to expand a student’s learning community. Since these assignments are created with openness in mind, they can be shared and reused as a resource at no cost by any institution to benefit their students and further enlarge a student’s learning community. Likewise, since Flipgrid is a free resource, it can easily be scaled within a LMS to serve the needs of an individual faculty member’s course.
Impact
Overall, students responded favorably to the open pedagogy assignments, which gave them the ability to interact with one another in more authentic ways in a digital learning space than using traditional discussion boards. Giving students multiple opportunities to engage in original multimodal composition throughout the course improved their ability to engage in different modes of composing. Students also reported feeling more confident as composers; developing their own video letters to future writing students served the purpose of helping incoming students understand the complexity and challenges presented by the curriculum, while also allowing current students to practice important communication skills that have real world application. Not only did student engagement with multimodality rise significantly as a result of the curriculum modifications, but students also improved their analytical and reflective skills with the structured assignments.
Attendee Interaction:
During this session, attendees will view several openly licensed student-created projects that are hosted on Flipgrid and Sutori. While the session is designed as asynchronous, attendees will still be able to watch and interact with the student generated material because student published them under CC-BY-SA licenses. Attendees will learn how open pedagogy function in hybrid courses; use simple free software to replicate OP within their own teaching; review anonymous student feedback about student’s perception of OP and their learning.
I've included a rough template of my presentation on my digital teaching portfolio that contains many of these student examples .