Open pedagogy = involving students in the creation of openly licensed materials. Open pedagogy, or open educational practices, involve the open sharing of teaching practices and information with the goal of improving education. On one level, this can be done through the use of open educational resources (OER). On another level, it can be inviting your students to be part of the teaching process and the co-creation of knowledge.
There are many ways to use open pedagogical practices in your courses. One approach involves your students choosing or creating content and assessments. Other approaches involve inviting students to help build course resources or create new resources on course topics. And, such as with courses than use a blank syllabus, students are invited to choose what a course covers and what they will engage with throughout the semester.
Pressbooks is a great way to invite your students to be co-creators of knowledge. Below is a list of resources and assignment ideas you can use to learn more about open pedagogy and explore how Pressbooks can be used with open pedagogical practices.
And, as always, if you have any questions or would like to talk to someone a bit more about open pedagogy or Pressbooks, reach us through the Contact link at the top and bottom of this page.
Open pedagogy resources
- The webinar “Open Pedagogy: The What, Why, and How” (about 1 hour) was recorded for the Open Education Network’s Certificate in OER Librarianship by Will Cross, Director of the Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center at NC State University Libraries. It’s available on the OEN’s YouTube channel, which has a lot of other great content related to open education.
- Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap (features case studies and resources)
- “A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students”
- “Expanding Our Sense of the Possible” (Steel Wagstaff’s presentation at 2019 OERizona workshop, which features examples of open pedagogy projects in Pressbooks)
- “The Open Faculty Patchbook: A Community Quilt of Pedagogy”
- Open Pedagogy Notebook website
- “The Values of Open Pedagogy”
- H5P OER Hub (for global collaboration on interactive learning activites)
- “OER Activity Sourcebook: An Interactive Resource Guide”
- H5P Activity Tutorials
- Sample Activities for Language Instruction
- Syllabus Annotation Exercise
Open peer review
- Open Textbook Library’s review criteria (10-category rubric)
- To do open peer review on content created in Pressbooks, you could use the Hypothesis annotation tool (see “10 Ways to Annotate with Students” and “Examples of Classroom Use”). Students could suggest edits by highlighting and making comments for changes.
- Or, for more granular edits, you could have students create content in Word, comment using Track Changes, then import students’ final versions into Pressbooks (see tips for importing from Word into Pressbooks).
Ideas for open pedagogy assignments
- 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