Originally published in the Learning and Teaching weekly newsletter (internal publication) at Saskatchewan Polytechnic.
Are you faced with disposable assignments that fail to engage students and are equally boring for you to mark? Perhaps you are frustrated with the number of cases of academic misconduct in your class, as the assignment can easily be found online. Not to mention that the course textbooks are expensive, dated and do not provide the local context.
Open Pedagogy provides a solution to all of these
issues. Open pedagogy is defined as the “use of open educational resources
(OER) to support learning, or the open sharing of teaching practices with a
goal of improving education and training at the institutional, professional,
and individual level” (BCcampus, n.d., para. 1). But what does that really mean
and how can you incorporate this activity into your classroom? A common example
of open pedagogy transforms the major course assignment, tasking each student
with researching and writing a portion of a larger text, website, or other open
option. A professor in the College of Education at the U of S did just that,
asking students to “contribute[ ] to the creation of an open textbook based on
their experiences as teachers of English as an additional language” (University
of Saskatchewan, n.d., para. 8). The opening page of the work details the assignment,
and the collection editor notes that the work expands the resources that are
available to teachers in EAL programs (Prokopchuk, 2019) not only in
Saskatchewan, but also across the globe. This resource has been licenced with
CC BY, which encourages further modification, adaption, and adoption by others.
Technically the same assignment, but the students have become contributors to
the field of knowledge, and this resource is made available for others to learn
from and use.
You may ask yourself, well what about next year? Because
your resource has been openly shared, it can continually be updated in each
subsequent iteration of the course. Open pedagogy has the potential to increase
student engagement, as students feel a sense of responsibility over the quality
of the work as it will be made publicly available. This type of project
increases student investment and provides them with real-world experience. Another
advantage of open pedagogy was noted by Baran and AlZoubi (2020) whose analysis
“revealed that awareness of ethical issues included student understanding about
copyrighting, reliability/credibility, and integrity of available open
resources” (p. 239). Learning to use and present information ethically is an
important part of digital literacy, as well as academic integrity. Jhangiani
and DeRosa (n.d.) emphasize that open pedagogy shifts the role of the students
from mere passive consumers to active contributors of knowledge where teachers
and students are active and equal participants in the learning process.
References and Suggested Further Reading
Baran, E., & AlZoubi, D.
(2020). Affordances, challenges, and impact of open pedagogy: Examining
students’ voices. Distance Education, 41(2), 230-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1757409
BCcampus. (n.d.). What
is open pedagogy? [Blog entry]. https://open.bccampus.ca/what-is-open-education/what-is-open-pedagogy/
Jhangiani, R., & DeRosa, R.
(n.d.). Open pedagogy [Blog entry]. Open Pedagogy
Notebook. http://openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy/
Prokopchuk, N. (2019). Sharing our
knowledge: Best practices for supporting English language learners in schools.
https://openpress.usask.ca/ealbestpractices/ [CC BY]
Teaching and Learning. (n.d.). Open
pedagogy. University of Saskatchewan. https://teaching.usask.ca/curriculum/open-pedagogy.php#OpenPedagogyandOurLearningCharter
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