Open pedagogy refers to a concept used to establish a pedagogical practice which allows the instruction to be more student-centered. Most importantly, there is a shift from a reciprocal learning experience to a more process-oriented experience. One of the key characteristics of open pedagogy is to get students more engaged by creating real-world products such as wiki projects, whole or partial e-textbooks, videos materials, and other supplements, instead of “disposable assignments” (Wiley, 2013).
There are many examples open pedagogy in the literature. There is growing research on how it works and the impacts revealed from empirical research. The present action research, as part of our OER-enabled pedagogy implementation, is another step in the process to better understand how and in what ways students, instructors, and instructional designers accomplished their goals and objectives with this approach and what students feel about this new approach.
The present project was a collaboration between a teaching faculty in psychology and an instructional designer. This collaboration was a literary process as we modified our approaches after each implementation in the previous semester. The present project was the third semester we implemented open pedagogy and took place in an undergraduate level human growth and development psychology course with 41 enrolled using an open textbook.
This presentation aims to provide information on how we replaced "disposable assignments" (i.e., paper writing, in our case) with activities, such as creating quiz questions for the quiz bank that can be used this semester and the future and peer-reviewing questions created by other students, which students ranked/selected good quality questions for the coming quiz. These activities allowed students to become familiar with the learning content by repeatedly retrieving it when taking on different activities (i.e., creating quiz questions, reviewing them, selecting good ones for the quiz, and finally taking the quiz.) The questions they created will be included in the quiz bank for future use. These activities added more value to the course and potentially generated more meaning for students by allowing them to participate.
The project also aims to examine what worked and what did not, how students felt about the time and effort that they invested in these assignments, and, most importantly, which specific practices were effectively used and reused. In this presentation, we will share what tools we used for implementation (i.e., online forms, peer-review rubric, guides for creating quiz questions etc.) and results learned from student surveys.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Articulate an example of an open pedagogy assignment that can be used in courses across disciplines
- Understand how open pedagogy can engage students with the material while contributing to the course material
- Implement the rubrics created by the presenters in open pedagogy assignments
