There are many good definitions and explanations of “open pedagogy” or “open education,” but far fewer curated lists of examples of what have been termed open educational practices (OEP) - the assignments, readings, projects, and products through which educators put the theory of open pedagogy into action. In attempting to compile inspiring examples of OEP, however, I was struck by both the variety I found and the consistent presence of one feature that tied the best of them together: creativity. That seems like a simple, even trite observation, but it nevertheless captures the essence of what OEP brings to college courses. In this post I’d like to think about how OEP benefit both students and faculty in reciprocal ways that are grounded in the way that open resources facilitate creativity.
The pedagogical power of creativity affects students and faculty, both groups benefiting from the freedom that working with openly licensed texts and tools provides. While those benefits are different for each group, they are also interrelated. The improved learning outcomes, grades, and subject mastery that can accompany more engaging assignments will likely translate to higher enrollments and better course evaluations for the faculty members who employ them. But there are other benefits - less measurable but arguably more impactful - for faculty who experiment with OEP, especially within courses they have taught many times. To think them through, I offer the following thought experiment:
Instead of critiquing term papers on identical topics year after year, many of which students never pick up let alone read, imagine spending your Sunday grading multimedia, digital essays which build on the best work of your previous students and therefore have different arguments and foci. The quality of the papers is likely to increase since your students can examine successful examples combining creativity and criticism from prior semesters, can work in media with which they may have more skill than writing, and can scour the internet for sources which they then evaluate for inclusion based on license as well as authoritativeness. This is all without mentioning the added effort often seen when students know their work could be seen by peers or future classes. Now imagine your grading being made even easier and more enjoyable by the student comments already added through the peer review process, feedback that the author had to incorporate and respond to in advance of final submission. Now think about how the time you spend grading the final papers of one semester is actually also preparation for the following semester since you’ll be adding the standouts to the collection of works on which future classes will build. Furthermore, uploading the drafts and iterations of each work, accompanied by your comments, will be a wonderful way to demonstrate your grading rubric and assignment expectations to new students. While the public would see the polished finished products that will serve as exemplars for later classes, the students will be able to see behind the scenes and, in so doing, gain a better understanding of how authority functions and knowledge is created and continuously revised.
Some you might be thinking that this can all be done with non-open resources, but I would argue that it is precisely the openness - or even more precisely, the ability of the students to understand intellectual property and navigate copyright implications - that makes this all possible and pedagogically effective. One class cannot build on the works of another without the proper licensing in place, and projects cannot be publicly posted on the web if they are in violation of copyright. But more crucially, without the permissions provided by open licensing, faculty could not set them lose on the internet and tell them that they should use their years of web surfing experience to find the perfect assortment of multimedia resources out of everything the internet has to offer. Only then can faculty hope and expect to be continually impressed by the creativity with which their students approach the same assignment semester after semester.
There is much debate around the idea that our students are now “digital natives” who come to college with a set of computer skills and technological concepts that we need to tap into rather than teach. While the curricular response might need a good deal more work, the motivating principle is valuable: college students arrive on campus with a profoundly different understanding of the ways that technology, information, and knowledge fit together. They also arrive to have their intellectual horizons widened, a goal at odds with the outdated constraints commonly put on their coursework. The freedom that comes from understanding and using OER has the potential to recenter creativity in the undergraduate curriculum while also reinvigorating the faculty members responsible for teaching it.
References
Jhangiani, R. (2015, Aug. 23). Pilot testing open pedagogy. Retrieved from: https://thatpsychprof.com/pilot-testing-open-pedagogy/
Wiley, D. (2013, Oct. 21). What is Open Pedagogy? Retrieved from: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975
