Open educational practices extend the idea of openness, access, and equity beyond selection of course materials and into teaching and learning practices.
What is open pedagogy?
The definition of open pedagogy is actively shifting, co-created by educators in dialogue across journals, blogs, and social media. Rather than a static definition, many advocates treat open pedagogy as a set of values and priorities on which to base their teaching, including learner-centeredness, accessibility, and prioritizing linguistic and cultural relevance.
The Open Pedagogy Notebook characterizes open pedagogy as “…an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education AND as a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part.”
Some materials and activities that fall under the umbrella of open pedagogy include:
- Non-disposable assignments, i.e. “…assignments that are sustainable or not disposable, assignments that would have benefit to others beyond the limited course time and space” (Bali 2017)
- Students contributing to assignment design, co-constructing course materials, such as created a collective annotated bibliography on a research topic
- Students conducting and presenting research to the wider public through various publishing forms (conference presentations, podcasts, etc.)
Assignment
- Read Open Pedagogy by Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani (Approx. reading time: 20 mins)
- Context: At the beginning of this article, the authors pose several questions to open up a broader conversation about education, en route to the ideas of Open Pedagogy. How does one synthesize educational theory and personal philosophies into daily practice?
Please respond to the questions below based on your reading of Open Pedagogy by DeRosa and Jhangiani.
Open Pedagogy Discussion Prompt (Section 3)
Proceed to the next section: Centering Accessibility in Course Design
