“Moreover, students asked to interact with OER to become part of a wider public of developers, much like an open-source community.”²

Learning Intention

“If faculty involve their students in interacting with OER, [the relationship between students and ‘texts’] becomes even more explicit, as students are expected to critique and contribute to the body of knowledge from which they are learning.”²

Overview

Faculty can go beyond teaching with open educational resources to engage in open educational practices by having students themselves develop and post OER. By doing so, faculty are asking for a higher level of course engagement, requiring students to become producers of new information rather than just consumers. Additionally, when students develop content to contribute to the global knowledge pool, assignments and assessments have more meaning beyond creation for just a grade.

Examples

• Edit a Wikipedia Article4: have students do careful research on a specific concept and then update a Wikipedia article.

• Edit or Add to a Course Text4: Ask students to gather materials on a topic to be added to the course readings, which might include finding their own journal articles or media, creating a summary of the materials, and uploading the summaries and citations to a shared class document. Or, have students edit material, abridge longer texts, or reorganize content.

• Create and Edit a Class Bibliography⁴: Have students generate a bibliography for all the texts being used in the course with summaries and organize the bibliography into course themes.

• Students Contribute to Open Textbooks³: Have students update a textbook specific to what they have been researching or learning about. For example, a sociology textbook about Canadian societies could be edited to be about American societies.

• Students Create Test Banks5: Engage students in creating sample questions and self-quizzing tools of the content that could be useful for future courses or students at other institutions.

• Case Studies: Students can write about themselves to contribute to a larger bank of case studies. See examples: http://cases.open.ubc.ca/

References

1. Bali, M. (2014). Best Assignment Ever: Liquid Syllabus. Retrieved from https://blog.mahabali.me/pedagogy/best-assignment-ever-liquid-syllabus/

2. DeRosa, R., & Robison, S. (2017). From OER to Open Pedagogy: Harnessing the Power of Open. In: Jhangiani, R S and Biswas-Diener, R. (eds.) Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. Pp. 115–124. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.i. License: CC-BY 4.0.

3. Hendricks, C. (2017). Open Pedagogy: Examples of Class Activities. Retrieved from https://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2017/10/08/open-pedagogy-examples/comment-page-1/

4. West, Q. Open Pedagogy Assignments Compilation. Retrieved on May 30, 2019, from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KWy_Dx8k0cIVa2bNM_Ma0v0JGiBpaGSQFC5mmciEfe8/edit

5. Jhangiani, R. (2017). Why have students answer questions when they can write them? Retrieved from http://thatpsychprof.com/why-have-students-answer-questions-when-they-can-write-them/