Open Educational Resources

Open Pedagogy refers to the set of active teaching and learning practices that become possible with OER: students actively contribute to knowledge creation by co-creating materials that can help future learners and researchers. 

Ditching the "Disposable Assignment"

David Wiley refers to the traditional assignment--in which students create work within the context of a class, turn it in for a grade, then never return to it--as "disposable." These assignments, he argues, offer no value to the world, and thus are of limited value for the teachers and students who create and grade them. Engaging in open pedagogical practices and incorporating OER into your teaching practice can show your students that their work has value beyond the scope of your course.

Assignments that utilize open pedagogical practices can include having your students edit Wikipedia, create course materials for future students, engage in citizen-science initiatives, or conduct research on the Frederick community to help community projects.

Read more about open pedagogy:

• Open Pedagogy Notebook
• Notes on Open Pedagogy
• OER-Enabled Pedagogy

From Open Education Group, below is a list of examples of assignments using open educational resources that use open pedagogical practices:  

• Students write or edit Wikipedia articles

  • Murder, Madness & Mayhem assigned students to edit (and if necessary create) Wikipedia articles about lesser known Latin American authors.
  • Azzam assigned fourth-year medical students to edit and improve Wikipedia articles related to public health topics.
  • See additional Wikipedia-based assignments here and here. Also, see this report that 6% of edits to science articles in on Wikipedia in April 2016 were made by students.
• Students remix audiovisual materials to both entertain and inform
  • Blogs and Wikis combines existing video with new audio to describe the difference between blogs and wikis.
  • Rick Noblenski: Blasting Caps Expert and Wiki Advocate combines existing video with new audio to advocate for the use of wikis in the teaching.
  • District Policies Regarding Blogs and Wikis combines existing video with new audio to warn teachers about how their desire to use social media may run afoul of school district policies.

• Students create or revise/remix entire textbooks

  • The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature was created by Robin DeRosa and her students.
  • Project Management for Instructional Designers was created by David Wiley and his students as an adaptation of an existing open textbook written for a different audience.

• Students openly license supplemental materials they create for each other

  • Teachers at Mountain Heights Academy encourage students to create openly licensed study guides, review games, tutorial videos, and other materials which they review and integrate into their courses.

• Students create test banks

  • Jhangiani describes a Social Psychology course in which 35 students created over 1400 test questions for a quiz bank.

• Students create their own assignments

  • DS106 has students create (or remix) and share assignments, together with worked examples, difficulty ratings, and tutorials for how to successfully complete the assignment.