Open/Open-Enabled Pedagogy

The Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap was developed by Christina Riehman-Murphy and Bryan McGeary as part of their capstone for the SPARC Open Educational Leadership Fellows program. The Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap is licensed CC-BY-NC. You can access the complete Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap Workbook in Google Drive where you can make a copy and then complete or edit them.

The term "open pedagogy" has been used in a variety of different ways over the past several decades. In recent years, its use has also become associated with Open Educational Resources (OER). The wide range of competing definitions of open pedagogy, together with its semantic overlap with another underspecified term, open educational practices, makes it difficult to conduct research on the topic of open pedagogy. In making this claim we do not mean to cast doubt on the potential effectiveness of the many pedagogical approaches labeled open. In this article, rather than attempting to argue for a canonical definition of open pedagogy, we propose a new term, "OER-enabled pedagogy," defined as the set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions that are characteristic of OER. We propose criteria used to evaluate whether a form of teaching constitutes OER-enabled pedagogy and analyze several examples of OER-enabled pedagogy with these criteria.

Before taking Evolution and Human Behavior BIO302 you could say that I was pretty ‘disconnected’. I had never heard of Open Pedagogy; in fact, I had never taken any sort of online course and the majority of my professors steered clear of using Canvas (BlackBoard/ Easel/ Moodle/ etc.) or any other online platform. I was accustomed to hard-copy textbooks, handwritten in-class worksheets, and producing tangible, hardy-copy projects. Little did I know that being accustomed to this form of learning would end up being the very issue I had with learning.

The use of open practices by learners and educators is complex, personal, and contextual; it is also continually negotiated. Higher education institutions require collaborative and critical approaches to openness in order to support faculty, students, and learning in an increasingly complex higher education environment.

Free learning content is somewhat inevitable. Good learning design and quality instruction, however, are not.

This website is designed to serve as a resource for educators interested in learning more about Open Pedagogy. We invite you to browse through the examples, which include both classroom-tested practices and budding ideas, and to consider contributing examples of your own experiments with open pedagogy.

How can we think about “open” beyond “openly licensed materials”? Granted, the licensing piece is incredibly important for access and distribution and remixing. But what else do we mean when we talk about “open,” and how can we think about “openness” as an ethos not simply a licensing agreement, one with tremendous power to shift education beyond a focus on “content”?

Open education resources can catalyze a much-needed national conversation about what we mean by “public” higher education, Robin DeRosa writes.

There seems too often to be an explicit agreement that instructors lead and students respond, that instructors advise as students seek guidance, that when instructors talk about their pedagogy, it should be outside of earshot of the students they instruct. Open digital platforms can break these implicit rules to make spaces for joint inquiry among all members of the college community in the spirit of Freirian ideals of critical pedagogy. Using open digital tools creates space for productive dialogue within and across courses and departments, allowing for critical co-investigation not just within a single course but in the college community. An open learning space in which everyone can work together enables browsing and viewing each other’s work, and empowers students to participate more fully in their education.

List includes list of guests and YouTube watch link.
I thought it might be useful to roughly curate some relatively recent work on the topic. I am hoping folks will help me fill in the gaps – as some already have! I will basically list authors here and only highlight something small to give an idea of what the posts are about.