LibGuides: Open Pedagogy: Resources and Assignment Ideas

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Subjects: Online Learning and Teaching, Open Educational Resources

What are Renewable Assignments?

Renewable assignments are meaningful alternatives to the disposable assignments that are commonplace in classrooms at all levels.

As Bob Casper, an Instructional Design Consultant with the Center for Teaching and Learning at Boise State University, asks (and answers), "What happens to student assignments after they are completed and graded? If the answer is 'nothing,' students (and the world) may be missing out on the benefits of their work."

Renewable assignments provide something to the course and the world, and they can be used, reused, remixed, and shared by classmates and instructors all over. These kinds of assignments teach students about their roles in the creation of knowledge and the responsibilities they have as creators.

Examples of renewable assignments are listed below.

Open Pedagogy Assignment Ideas

Community problem solving project -- their communities, a problem they define, etc. (from Jesseka Zeleike)
Open syllabi – students become responsible for filling out the syllabus and doing the work to find the resources (from Krys Ziska Strange)
Real-world case studies – tying student assignments to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to solve problems around poverty, hunger, education, health care, clean water, gender equality, clean energy, etc.
Student-created test question banks (Jennifer Ravia is doing this in D2L for Nutritional Sciences)
Wikipedia editing projects – improving the diversity of Wikipedia entries (e.g., creating entries for Black female scientists), currency of resources, and factual accuracy
Translations – taking an existing OER and translating it into another language
How-to videos – students create videos to demonstrate how to do something step-by-step
Anthologies – collections of student-selected and annotated readings

These ideas were compiled by Cheryl Cuillier and shared on the LibOER email group.

Manifold Scholarship - CUNY
Although Touro does not have its own installation of Manifold, our community members can look at the resources published by CUNY which engage in Open Pedagogy through these publishing projects.
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From the site: "With Manifold, you can publish dynamic digital texts with rich media support, powerful annotation tools, and robust community dialogue. Manifold transforms scholarly publications into living digital works. This CUNY installation serves as a free publishing platform for the CUNY community, where you can create projects to house either your own scholarship or custom classroom versions of texts and textbooks that are openly licensed or in the public domain."

Open Pedagogy Resources

The OER Starter Kit - Open Pedagogy
A section of the comprehensive text which defines open pedagogy, describes renewable assignments, and shares ideas for the creation of such assignments
A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students
From the site: "A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources. This is a first edition, compiled by Rebus Community, and we welcome feedback and ideas to expand the text." Edited by Elizabeth Mays
Got a minute? Instruction tune-up for time pressed librarians
Edited by Alison Hicks. This volume is an example of a student-created resource that engages in the practice of open pedagogy.
Student Rights & Faculty Responsibilities
From "A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students" edited by Elizabeth Mays
OER Activity Sourcebook: An Interactive Resource Guide
By Naomi Salmon
The Open Faculty Patchbook: A Community Quilt of Pedagogy

CORE 101 Open Pedagogy Project
From Roger Williams University
Open Education Workshops for Subject Liaisons
From the resource: "The materials in this toolkit are meant to provide librarians with an OER role a set of resources to engage their subject liaison librarian colleagues with Open Education, via facilitated workshops. These workshops aim to engage subject librarians in the work of Open Education, to build community and empower librarians to advocate for Open Education with their own departments.
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All materials are CC-BY licensed, meaning others can distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this work, as long as they credit me, Lauren Ray, University of Washington Libraries. You are encouraged to use these resources and alter them to meet your own institutional needs. Please make a copy of the resources, rather than editing the originals."
Expanding our sense of the possible [OERizona]
Presented by Steel Wagstaff and Apurva Ashok at OERizona in October 2019

The Values of Open Pedagogy
By Caroline Sinkinson on EDUCAUSE
5Rs for Open Pedagogy
Rajiv Jhangiani's 5Rs for open pedagogy: respect, reciprocate, risk, reach, resist

Open Pedagogy Notebook
From the site: This website is designed to serve as a resource for educators interested in learning more about Open Pedagogy...
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We invite you to browse through the examples, which include both classroom-tested practices and budding ideas, and to consider contributing examples of your own experiments with open pedagogy.

This Notebook builds on the work of a great open colleague Terry Greene and The Open Faculty Patchbook, which exists in both website and book form."

Open Textbook Network YouTube Channel
Videos from the Open Textbook Network covering open pedgagogy and beyond

These resources were compiled from those suggested by Cheryl Cuillier, Phil Barker, and Bebe Chang on the LibOER email group, and Amanda Larson and Lindsey Gumb during their presentation in the OTN Summit 2020.