Purposeful Action: Other Projects That Live Out Open Values at UW

“Open Pedagogy’ and ‘OER’ are shorthand terms that map out what other educators and learners can do with published educational materials. In their most common definition, the terms describe projects that are both freely accessible and that have an open license that permits reuse and adaptation.

However, the term “Open Education” encompasses a wider spectrum of educational approaches than just OER and open pedagogy projects. Often, the same values that draw people to open education are the values that prompt them to restrict reuse permissions in specific circumstances. (To provide one example: open pedagogy practitioners believe that autonomy and critical media literacy are central to honoring students as learners and creators, so an instructor may invite students to decide whether their work is publicly available or openly licensed.)

In this collection, we celebrate the full spectrum of open education practices. In the following section, you’ll find pages that highlight:

• creative approaches to student-created media in the classroom
• freely-shared learning resources at UW-Madison
• open data projects and citizen science projects