Renewable Assignments

Free access to materials is not the only benefit of using OER. Another aspect of OER that is commonly commended by instructors is the academic freedom that using openly-licensed content affords them in taking control of their classroom and engaging students in learning.

Open pedagogy, while challenging to define is, in essence, “the approach to teaching in which students join the academic conversation of a topic by creating course materials that they can choose to share with an open license. ^[1]” (Casey, et al)

View the following video (run time: 3 minutes and 5 seconds) to hear a faculty member at the University of British Columbia as he discusses open pedagogy practices in his classroom.

Attribution: “Open Dialogues: How to engage and support students in open pedagogies” by Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia is licensed CC BY 3.0.

One method of engaging in open pedagogy is the development of renewable assignments, assignments which students create for the purpose of sharing and releasing as OER. These can range in content from individual writing assignments in Wikipedia to collaboratively-written textbooks.^[2][3] Wiley & Hilton compiled the criteria in Table 2 to distinguish between different kinds of assignments, from least to most open.^[4] You can explore more examples of open pedagogy in action in the Open Pedagogy Portal.

When applied to assignments, open pedagogy tends to display five different characteristics:

1. incorporating feedback,
2. providing options,
3. encouraging ownership,
4. having value beyond knowledge,
5. and being shared with others.

These characteristics can appear singly, be used together, or have significant overlap. Renewability is a spectrum depending on how many of the characteristics are present, which provides room to choose which ones align best with the learning objectives of a course and classroom culture.^[5]

Attribution: “Building-in Student Buy-in: Disposable vs Renewable Assignments” by Amanda Grey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Tools for implementing renewable assignments

• Hypothes.is: One of the tools commonly used for open pedagogy projects is Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is allows users to annotate websites and online readings easily. Using hypothes.is can let students engage with your course readings and each other in a more interactive way than discussion boards might allow. UVA offers Hypothes.is as one of the Canvas-integrated tools. For more information/access.
• Wikibooks: Wikibooks and WikiEdu are both excellent tools for working with students to create a text. Alternatively, short student projects, such as annotated bibliographies, can be done via Wikipedia by adding context and citations to short or underdeveloped articles. This not only gives students the opportunity to get experience explaining concepts for a public audience, it also increases the available public knowledge on your course’s topic!
  Bethany has co-taught classes with Meridith Wolnick involving WikiEdu and student authored texts.  She’d be happy to share additional information about the experience.
  
• Google Drive: Google Drive provides a variety of tools that can be used for collaboration on text-based projects as well as slideshows and spreadsheets.
• YouTube: Student-made instructional videos or class projects can be incredibly useful to showcase for future students in the class or to use as supplemental materials for explaining difficult concepts.

Additional tools can be found on UVA’s Learning Tech webpage.