What is Open Pedagogy?

To define open pedagogy, we need to break it down to its two components, open and pedagogy:

Open, in this instance, refers to open educational resources (OER) – defined by UNESCO as “any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license.”

Pedagogy is the practice and method of teaching; how we teach, rather than what we teach. Open pedagogy, also known as open educational practices (OEP), is the use of open educational resources (OER) to support learning, or the open sharing of teaching practices with a goal of improving education and training at the institutional, professional, and individual level.

When you use open pedagogy in your classroom, you are inviting your students to be part of the teaching process, participating in the co-creation of knowledge. (Adapted from by BCcampus, licensed under CC BY).

Examples of open pedagogy projects may include:

• Involving students in writing or updating an OER as part of their coursework or learning process
• Creating and openly licensing a website of student presentation videos
• Creating a public annotated bibliography or database of resources written by students for others to use for research
• Doing a class project to create or improve Wikipedia pages on topics relevant to the course

5Rs for Open Pedagogy

Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D., writes about the 5Rs for Open Pedagogy – in other words, five central tenets of open pedagogy. These values provide a framework for open educational practices They are:

• Respect: for the agency of students and creators, including whether they wish to perform public scholarship or not, and, if they do, what specific license or label they are comfortable applying to their intellectual property. Be mindful of the labour that goes into open pedagogy, visible and invisible. Not everything could or should be open. Open pedagogy without respect for agency is exploitation.
• Reciprocate: by not just drawing on but also contributing back to the commons, by sharing resources, practices, and ideas and helping to build upon and contextualize the resources, practices, and ideas of others. Practice good citizenship of the commons. Open pedagogy is about community.
• Risk: is ever present with open pedagogy, from the platforms that we utilize that mine and monetize our intellectual labour and the digital footprints that we require our students to leave in the course of their education to the open sharing of unpolished ideas and practices that leave us exposed and open to criticism and judgment. Open pedagogy involves vulnerabilities and risks that are not distributed evenly and that should not be ignored or glossed over. These risks are substantially higher for women, students and scholars of colour, precarious faculty, and many other groups and voices that are marginalized by the academy.
• Reach: involves having an impact that extends well beyond the classroom, a course, or a semester, beyond the artificial divides between formal and informal learners, beyond what could possibly be envisioned when crafting precise and predetermined learning objectives. Open pedagogy takes on a life of its own because learning is living.
• Resist: against forces that conspire to pit increasingly precarious faculty against increasingly precarious students. Resist against the commodification of learning. Resist against the neoliberal university. Resist being brokers for surveillance capitalism. Open pedagogy is not a panacea but it strives to be antiracist, democratizing, liberatory, and decolonized (Adapted from 5Rs for Open Pedagogy by Rajiv Jhangiani, licensed under CC BY-SA).

What are some platforms and tools used in open pedagogy projects?

Pressbooks

Offered for free to VCU faculty and staff, Pressbooks is a WordPress-based online platform for self-publishing digital books. Pressbooks can be used to create monographs, open textbooks, or other open educational resources, either by adapting existing resources or starting a new project from scratch. Pressbooks supports embedded video, audio, accessible math notation, and H5P to include interactive learning activities and quizzes.

Hypothes.is

Hypthes.is is a social annotation tool, available as an integrated plugin on Pressbooks or for free as a browser extension. Users can add annotations and highlight text on a webpage, including PDFs, and can respond to others’ comments. Instructors can create private groups for individual sections of students, or use the public annotation space, which is visible to anyone who visits your book.

Wikipedia

While students commonly use Wikipedia to access information, they don’t often think about the information creation and curation processes behind the platform. Wikipedia is a free, familiar, and highly-used platform, which makes it an excellent tool for giving back to the knowledge commons by sharing student research and for demystifying the process of scholarship by walking students through peer review, sourcing, citation, and research.

StoryMap

StoryMap is a free platform that allows users to create location-based digital storytelling projects. Users can add images, texts, videos, and other multimedia to a map to share place-based research, and StoryMaps are easily made public to share on the web.

What are some considerations when implementing open educational practices?

• Scaffold Learning: Not all students will be familiar with technology or able to engage with OER quickly. It’s important that you scaffold technology support into your teaching so all students can be on the same page when it comes to using the tools you’ve created or adopted.
• Understand your Tools: Make sure that you are choosing a tool or technology that your students can easily learn and– if it is not already familiar to them– that you have included time in your course for teaching students how to use your chosen tool.
• Copyright: It’s important that students who are creating items that might be published and shared openly can understand what that means. Focus on building a comfortable foundation of knowledge about CC licenses: the rest, if necessary, can come later. Focus on building a comfortable foundation of knowledge about CC licenses: the rest, if necessary, can come later.
• Privacy: While some students might be okay with the idea of their work being seen, used, or edited by future students, others may not be okay with it. Allow students to opt out of making their materials public if they are uncertain about doing so and give them the option to remove their name from public documents if they are uncertain about this for any reason. (Adapted from ‘Considerations for Using Open Pedagogy’ in The OER Starter Kit by Abbey Elder, licensed under CC BY).

Further Reading

Examples of Specific Use Cases in OER Projects

• Open Pedagogy Notebook – Examples
  • Contains examples of particular use cases of open pedagogy by faculty across various disciplines and levels.
• Open Pedagogy with Faculty & Students
  • This article features an open education global conference between faculty and students to learn about the benefits of participating in open pedagogy in the classroom and the projects that have come out of switching to this kind of learning in academia.

Other Resources

• What is Open Pedagogy?
  • By David Wiley, this article explains what open pedagogy is and how it can be more beneficial for the next generation of students rather than the “busy work” most students get.
• Open Pedagogy Toolkit
  • The Open Pedagogy Toolkit aims to highlight relevant literature, resources, projects, and research in the area of open pedagogy. This toolkit was developed by a multi-institutional group, The Open Practices Collaborative, whose purpose was to focus on building relationships that support us as we create, share, and collaborate on various projects that support the Open movement.
• Open Pedagogy Notebook
  • Contains information about how to open the discussion of open pedagogy in the classroom and in what ways it benefits both the teachers and the students.

Sources

Elder, A. (2019, July). Considerations for Using Open Pedagogy. Retrieved December 12, 2024, from Pressbooks.pub website: https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/oerstarterkit/chapter/considerations-open-pedagogy/ (licensed under CC BY).

Jhangiani, R. (2019, April 11). 5Rs for Open Pedagogy. Retrieved from Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D. website: https://thatpsychprof.com/5rs-for-open-pedagogy/ (licensed under CC BY-SA).

What is Open Pedagogy? – BCcampus OpenEd Resources. (n.d.). Retrieved from BC Campus OpenED website: https://open.bccampus.ca/what-is-open-education/what-is-open-pedagogy (licensed under CC BY).