Using open educational resources in the classroom can make it easier for students to access and interact with course materials. However, another major aspect of Open Education asks not “what you teach with” but “how you teach.” The set of pedagogical practices that include engaging students in content creation and making learning accessible is known as open pedagogy. As DeRosa & Jhangiani explain, “one key component of open pedagogy might be that it sees access, broadly writ, as fundamental to learning and to teaching, and agency as an important way of broadening that access.”^[1] DeRosa & Robison expand on this topic, explaining that:

“students asked to interact with OER become part of a wider public of developers, much like an open-source community. We can capitalize on this relationship between enrolled students and a broader public by drawing in wider communities of learners and expertise to help our students find relevance in their work, situate their ideas into key contexts, and contribute to the public good.”^[2]

Depending on the source you consult, open pedagogy might be a series of practices, a learning approach, or a state of mind. For the sake of this chapter, open pedagogy is defined as a series of practices which involve engaging students in a course through the development, adaptation, or use of open educational resources.

One method of engaging in open pedagogy is the development of renewable assignments, assignments which students create for the purpose of sharing and releasing as OER. These can range in content from individual writing assignments in Wikipedia to collaboratively-written textbooks.^[3][4] Wiley & Hilton compiled the criteria in Table 2 to distinguish between different kinds of assignments, from least to most open.^[5] You can explore more examples of open pedagogy in action in the Open Pedagogy Notebook.

What Can Open Pedagogy Look Like in Practice?

• Many instructors invite students to use the classroom research process to improve Wikipedia, an approach that provides students with a wide and authentic audience as well as an opportunity to address inequities in the knowledge documented on the site. To learn more about the Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons that the UW-Madison Libraries have hosted over the years, see “Authentic Research Efforts: Addressing Gaps In Wikipedia.“
• Open pedagogy assignments often create ripple effects of their own! For example, Robin Derosa of Plymouth State University invited students to collaboratively compose their own textbook, the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature. Because the students shared their work under an open license, they made it possible for the text to grow and evolve beyond their course. In future years, Abby Goode’s students expanded the project, and later Timothy Robbins’s students at the University of Graceland and other volunteers from a range of other institutions expanded in turn (DeRosa, Sheridan, Robbins).
• Open pedagogy approaches can also expand beyond the classroom. For instance, Remi Kalir facilitates an ongoing, decentralized discussion group in which people collaboratively annotate texts on the open web through his “Marginal Syllabus” project.
• In the short video below, David Gaertner, an instructor in First Nations and Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia, describes some of the practices and values that motivate his own classroom practice:

Attribution: “Open Dialogues: How to engage and support students in open pedagogies” by Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia is licensed CC BY 3.0.

Advocating for Student Agency (New content by Our OER working Group)

Instructors who create opportunities for students to compose open resources for wider audiences must also honor each learner’s unique needs. One of the principles underlying most open pedagogy approaches is the belief that all students should have the right to determine whether and how their work might be seen by wider audiences. ^[6] For this reason, creativity and flexibility are key for effective open pedagogy assignment design.

Valuing students’ autonomy means providing students with a choice about whether or not to publish a piece of writing in a way that is accessible to others outside of the course. Students should also have the ability to choose whether what they compose for a course will be released with an open license or not. To promote student agency, instructors often invite students to adopt a pseudonym for work they share on a course website or zine. They also take time to unpack what open licenses allow and to ensure that students understand what that means for them.

Open pedagogy approaches also require instructors to take digital platforms into account. Because online tools’ privacy and data-mining policies are not always designed in students’ interests (and are sometimes liable to change!) it is important for instructors to be sensitive to the implications of using online platforms in a teaching context.^[7] Open pedagogy practitioners do not urge a single approach or solution to tensions like these, but instead view confronting them on an ongoing basis as a central responsibility for instructors in the twenty-first century.