Background

Open pedagogy has been used in many different ways over the years in research, recently it has become associated with Open Educational Resources (OER).  These different definitions make it difficult to conduct research on the topic of open pedagogy.  This article focuses on defining OER and gives criteria for how to evaluate it.  One key goal of OER is to create renewable assignments and move away from traditional disposable technology.

The Open Educational Quality Initiative (OPAL; 2011) define open educational practices as “a set of activities around instructional design and implementation of events and process intended to support learning.  They also include the creation, use and repurposing of Open Educational Resources (OER) and their adaptation to the contextual setting.

Key points

• The “open” in open educational resources indicates that these materials are licensed with copyright licenses that provide permission for everyone to participate in the 5R activities
  • Retain—the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage).
  • Reuse—the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g.,  In a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video).
  • Revise—the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language).
  • Remix—the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new.  (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup).
  • Redistribute—the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend).
• The following four questions are asked to ensure OER enabled pedagogy. This article uses it as an evaluation tool across multiple assignments in different field of study.
• There have been four questions created to evaluate assignments.  These questions are used throughout the paper as methodology for evaluating four different areas of learning’s assignments.

1. 1. Are students asked to create new artifacts (essays, poems, videos, songs, etc.) or revise/remix existing OER?
   2. Does the new artifact have value beyond supporting the learning of its author?
   3. Are students invited to publicly share their new artifacts or revised/remixed OER?
   4. Are students invited to openly license their new artifacts or revised/remixed OER?

• These questions prove to work well for educators to create meaningful and OER enabled assignments.

Discussion

The historical concept of learning by making goes back in research for quite some time.  In soap-sculpture math, Papert (1991) saw that learning “happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity”.  Something others can see, review, critique, and value.

The example below is from a class titled “Murder, Madness and Mayhem.”  Beasley-Murray (n.d.) was teaching a course at the University of British Columbia that focused on Latin American literary texts.  He assigned students to edit (and if necessary, create) Wikipedia articles about each of the texts covered in class.  Beasley-Murray felt this project would be important because it had “tangible and public, if not necessarily permanent, effects” (para. 9)

Below is an evaluation example using the four key questions presented.

• Are students asked to create new artifacts (essays, poems, videos, songs, etc.) or revise/remix existing OER?
  • Yes, the nature of the assignment is the creation or modification of OER.
• Does the new artifact have value beyond supporting the learning of its author?
  • Yes. Wikipedia articles are viewed by millions of people each month.
• Are students invited to publicly share their new artifacts or revised/remixed OER?
  • Yes. By definition, Wikipedia articles are publicly shared.
• Are students invited to openly license their new artifacts or revised/remixed OER?
  • Yes. By definition, Wikipedia articles are openly licensed.

Discussion questions

1. Do students who are assigned to create, revise or remix artifacts find these assignments more valuable, do they revisit them later?
2. Can they link them to a portfolio to help them gain employment?
3. Are students able to voice their own opinion openly on historically and scientific results? Or is the teacher grading them on criteria they don’t agree with?  Is there freedom of speech?
4. Does making an assignment public demonstrate greater mastery?

 Additional references

• Open Educational Quality Initiative.  (2011).  Beyond OER: Shifting the focus to open educational practices.  The 2011 OPAL Report.

Papert, S. (1991).  Situating constructionism.  In S. Papert & I. Harel (eds.), Constructionism (pp. 1–11).  New York, NY: Ablex Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.papert.org/articles/situatingconstructionism.html

Beasley-Murray, J. (n.d.)  Was introducing Wikipedia to the classroom an act of madness leading only to mayhem if not murder?  Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.rg/wiki/user:jbmurray/madness