Working With Students: Open Pedagogy
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 to improve education and training at the institutional, professional, and individual levels. 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.
There are many ways of building open pedagogy into your learning environment. You can engage your students:
- To create a set of exercises for a specific chapter in an open textbook.
- Provide feedback on a current resource.
- Incorporate student assignments into a collection of OER or update a current OER.
Instead of using disposable assignments that offer no value to the student or the instructors, your students, under your direction and supervision, can build a resource designed to improve the learning space for future students.
Renewable assignments (non-disposable assignments) are defined as “tasks in which students compile and openly publish their work so that the assignment outcome is inherently valuable to the community” (Wiley & Hilton, 2018).
Benefits
- students are asked to engage in — as part of an organized course;
- promotes student learning — through the completion of the assignment;
- affords assessment of students’ learning of course objectives;
- adds value beyond students’ own learning — because students are invited to openly license and publicly share their digital creations.
General Examples
Fanshawe Examples
The following are some examples of Student work published openly.
- Collection of Student Research Assignments (Anatomy and Physiology of Plants in Carolinian Canada OER)
- Collection of Short Stories written by students (Within These Walls)
- Graduates share video experiences (Working in Play OER)
- Students develop textbook examples (Global Marketing in a Digital World OER)
- Students develop textbook content (Strategic Project Management for HR OER)
- Student video perspectives ( Pre-Health Science Pathways to Success OER)
- Student video perspectives ( Experiential Marketing OER)
Student Rights
Students are the authors of their work and ought to be treated in the same manner as any other author whose work you reference and adapt for your OER. Students have the right to authorize how their work is shared beyond the classroom, including the choice to share their work openly, the choice of what license to use, and the name under which they would like to be attributed, if at all.
Students will vary in their comfort with respect to publishing their work and many may choose to not publish at all. Students shall not be penalized in any manner whatsoever for their choices regarding publication.
Assessment Statement / Disclaimer
It is important to clarify to students the benefits of open pedagogy and the purpose of the renewable assignment. If a student would like their work to be included in the OER, they are invited to add a Creative Commons license to the work that they submit. That said, students must be allowed to hand in the assignment without applying an open license to their work. This is because students are the copyright holders of their work, not their professors.
If students submit video or media material, they can fill out the content license form linked below and send it to their professor. See the sample email to students below.
All student’s work must meet a standard of quality and integrity to be included in the OER. For example, minor edits may be made to a student’s submission to improve readability; however, if the submission requires significant edits, it may not be included in the final publication. Likewise, all submissions must cite their sources and be free of plagiarism. Submissions that substantially copy sources protected by copyright cannot be included.
Process to Obtain Student Permission
- Reach out to the copyright officer at copyright@fanshawec.ca and provide a list of email addresses for your students contributing to the project. Please include the course name, course code and the assignment name.
- The copyright officer will email the students in the following language, and the students will respond to the email with their responses.*Faculty Name- replace* is developing an open educational resource for students in the *course and/or program name*. The resource will include content created by students. As a student, if you would like to include your content in the open resource and publicly share it under the open license *add a license for the project here*, please respond to this email with your acceptance.
To learn more about open licenses, please visit the Creative Commons website. If you have any questions, you can email oer@fanshawec.ca
Library Support
Copyright Orientation for Students
The Copyright Services Office has a video resource to introduce students to copyright and OERs. It covers (i) what copyright is, (ii) what an OER is, (iii) what an open license is, and (iv) students rights in their work.
It is recommended that all open pedagogy assignments include a sub-assignment where students view the above video and then complete an exercise to ensure their comprehension. For example, this sub-assignment could be a task involving students locating an openly licensed image and providing the correct attribution for it. Additional questions regarding copyright may be addressed to copyright@fanshawec.ca.
Referencing Orientation for Students
The Subject Librarians can provide instructional sessions for students on referencing and citation. These sessions can be in-person, virtual or asynchronous. Faculty can also book individual consultations with their Subject Librarian. For more information on how to book an instructional session or consultation, faculty and staff can visit the Services for Faculty and Staff page.
Students can book one-on-one appointments for referencing and citation support with Outreach Services and Writing Services.
Additional Resources
Extending Into the Open by Paula Demacio; Alissa Bigelow; Tricia Bonner; and Shauna Roch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
“What is Open Pedagogy” from What is Open Education by BCcampus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
