Project Archive: Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library and Student Collaborations

OER Project Directory Open Pedagogy: Varied Definitions, Multiple App...
1

This is a snapshot of project information archived on 2 September 2022. Please contact the project team for most recent updates.

Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library and Student Collaborations

Subject: Other Education

Book Language: English

Audience: academic faculty, librarians, and library staff implementing or expanding open pedagogy projects

Book Cover: https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/app/uploads/sites/232/2020/06/Open-Pedagogy-cover-350x453.png

Created date: November 6, 2019

Updated date: July 22, 2022

Target Release Date: 2020-08-01

License:

  • Attribution

Needs:

  • Followers

Description:

The book will be published via

Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo

, using the software platform

Pressbooks

. It will also appear as a

Pressbooks project on the Rebus Community platform

when released.

We anticipate four primary sections to the book: Theoretical and Framing chapters

Open Student Projects

Textbook Replacement Projects

Open Pedagogical Design Projects

Our current project timeline: Author Agreement signed by all contributing authors due: June 17, 2019

Reader-ready complete drafts of accepted chapters due: July 31, 2019

Drafts will be returned with comments September 13, 2019

Revised drafts for peer review due approximately October 31, 2019

Peer review completed approximately December 31, 2019

Final drafts due approximately February 21, 2020

Final editing and project release date June, 2020

Short Description:

Read the book here:

Open Pedagogy Approaches

The term “open” has been heavily used in the past decade or more and can come with multiple interpretations: open access, open source, open textbook, open pedagogy … In general, “open” within these contexts implies unlimited, free, public access with the ability to manipulate and transform the educational content.

Within the educational realm, we see even greater nuances of “open” in terms of how the access to and adapted creation work together. Our book aims to shed light on multiple definitions and how they are applied in a variety of learning experiences.

Chapters provide case studies

of library-teaching faculty collaborations that explore the intersecting roles and desired outcomes that each partner contributes toward student learning in an open environment.

Outline

Theoretical and Framing Chapters

Informed Open Pedagogy and Information Literacy Instruction in Student-Authored Open Projects

Open pedagogy has often been touted as empowering, liberating, and revolutionary. While many interpretations of the term open pedagogy exist, this chapter specifically focuses on an open pedagogy in which students are creating openly licensed works in a classroom environment. Open pedagogy affords librarians, instructors, and students a unique way to guide how courses are taught and how students learn. However, while working openly can be empowering, liberating, or revolutionary, I argue that it is unethical to mandate or strongly encourage students to produce open work without themselves understanding the implications of working openly. I argue that it is only when students understand the political intent behind these types of open projects⁠ that they might decide for themselves to continue to engage in and support open work.

Approaching Open Pedagogy in Community and Collaboration

Motivated to more fully explore pedagogical innovations that engage “both educators and learners to become more active participants in educational processes and creators of content as members of an inclusive knowledge society” (UNESCO, 2019), we invited a community of educators together to investigate the pedagogical possibilities of open education and to dwell in questions about learners’ agency and ownership of their education. In this chapter, we describe a partnership that formed through mutual investment in reshaping approaches to teaching and learning within our local university setting. We provide the theoretical background of the project as well as share the structure, essential elements, and strategies employed to form a series of faculty learning communities focused on open pedagogy.

Introduction and Overview

Evolving into the Open: A Framework for Collaborative Design of Renewable Assignments

As the integration of OER within classes compels instructors to reconsider the assigned course materials, open pedagogy recasts the role of course assignments and activities students engage in within a course. Yet, many are grappling with how to create and redesign assignments to engage students in open pedagogy. In this chapter, we make a case for applying open pedagogy in teacher education coursework and, utilizing a specific case, describe a Renewable Assignment Design Framework that may be adapted by librarians and faculty when planning for open educational practices.

Open Pedagogy Big and Small: : Comparing Open Pedagogy Efforts in Large and Small Higher Ed Settings

While OER awareness continues to be important, and education and advocacy continue to be necessary, it is time to continue thinking about what the next steps for the open education movement should be. To that end, the authors chose to examine two current open pedagogy programs in two different higher education settings: one large research-focused university and one small private liberal arts college. Through semi-structured interviews with faculty and staff members working on open education initiatives in various stages of development, the authors sought to compare and contrast the programs and the people involved in these efforts so that we may better understand how open pedagogy works in each of these settings.

Textbook Replacement Projects

Reading British Modernist Texts: A Case in Open Pedagogy

In this paper, we discuss the application of Open Pedagogical strategies in a library session for undergraduate students. I was then the Humanities Librarian at the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester. Professor Bette London of the English Department was teaching the course ‘Making Modernism New Again’ in Spring 2017. My colleague, Joe Easterly, the Digital Humanities Librarian, worked with the platform, CommentPress, that enabled our implementation of Open Pedagogical practices. By enabling students to gain agency in their own learning and by using literary texts in the public domain, we adopted Open Pedagogy in praxis.

Adapting Open Educational Course Materials in Undergraduate General Psychology

In this chapter, we demonstrate: (a) the importance of collaborative campus partnerships during the process of integrating affordable content as course materials, and (b) the importance of basic research in making the transition to OER and in the selection of an appropriate textbook. Our experience at The George Washington University (GWU) brings together a faculty member’s instruction skills and subject-matter expertise, a librarian’s professional skills in locating information sources and understanding of copyright and creative commons licensing, and the voice of their students, whose feedback ensures that changes will result in positive learning experiences. Supportive roles of each of these groups will be explored in an initiative to reduce the cost of resources for student learning while maintaining the same quality learning.

Open Pedagogy Big and Small: Comparing Efforts in Large and Small Higher Education Settings

While OER awareness continues to be important, and education and advocacy continue to be necessary, it is time to continue thinking about what the next steps for the open education movement should be. To that end, the authors chose to examine two current open pedagogy programs in two different higher education settings: one large research-focused university and one small private liberal arts college. Through semi-structured interviews with faculty and staff members working on open education initiatives in various stages of development, the authors sought to compare and contrast the programs and the people involved in these efforts so that we may better understand how open pedagogy works in each of these settings.

Humanities in the Open: The Challenges of Creating an Open Literature Anthology

This chapter will discuss the process of building an OER from scratch and the pedagogical implications of incorporating an open anthology in a literature course. Traditional anthologies supply the reader with historical context and authorial background—both important aspects of a literature survey course. They run through literary history in a linear and temporally cogent fashion; precisely the methodology that seeks to understand history and culture through the lens of literature. To be clear, we are not arguing against a historical approach or the intermingling of history and literature in a survey course. Rather, we suggest that remaining firmly and solely bound to a historical context in a literature course denies the contemporary reader the ability to engage with texts in dynamic ways and make connections between texts and cultures.

Mathematics Courses and the Ohio Open Ed Collaborative

Funded by a $1.3 million grant from the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE), the Ohio Open Ed Collaborative (OOEC) is a multi-institutional initiative that seeks to make high-impact courses at two- and four-year institutions across the state more affordable through the curation and creation of high-quality, peer-reviewed learning materials that are aligned to Ohio’s Transfer Assurance Guides (TAGs). This chapter focuses on several OOEC mathematics courses, including the processes of team member selection, project workflow, content selection/creation, review, and making course content available. The chapter ends with evaluations of the project thus far and recommendations for those wishing to begin a similar initiative.

A 2-for-1 Deal: Earn Your AA while Learning about Information Literacy Using OER

Working at a state college, there is a constant balancing act between providing the highest level of resources to our students while increasing accessibility, given some of the practical limitations of our students. Providing intensive and focused education on information literacy is particularly important for this population of students who may not have the same access to credible sources as those in higher socioeconomic situations. In this paper, learn how we leveraged an Achieving the Dream grant to provide a full Associates program using Open Educational Resources (OER). Also, follow a faculty-librarian partnership that enhances information literacy through providing OER courses and class projects on Information Literacy.

Library Support for Scaffolding OEP in a General Education Science Course

This chapter describes the collaboration between an adjunct professor of CORE 101: Scientific Investigations, and a Scholarly Communications Librarian & Assistant Professor at Roger Williams University (RWU) in which OER-enabled pedagogy has been incorporated into a general education science course for non-science majors. The overarching goal of this collaboration has been to replace the course’s static and ‘disposable’ final paper and poster presentations with Google Sites that will serve as learning objects developed by non-science majors, for non-science majors. Students voluntarily opt to openly-license their Sites, which permits each subsequent semester’s cohort of students in CORE 101 to contribute to the expansion of this scholarship, dependent on their own relevant areas of interest.

Open Student Projects

“And Still We Rise”: Open Pedagogy and Black History at a Rural Comprehensive State College

In Spring 2019, students at The State University of New York College at Plattsburgh (SUNY Plattsburgh) researched, designed, and built And Still We Rise: Celebrating Plattsburgh’s (Re)Discovery of Iconic Black Visitors (ASWR), an exhibit in the Feinberg Library on prominent Black political and cultural figures who had visited the college since the 1960s. The thirteen students in African-American Political Thought (Political Science 371), taught by Dr. John McMahon, researched in the college’s archives and secondary sources to curate photos, text and multimedia for physical and virtual exhibits.

Scholarly Bridges: SciComm Skill-Building with Student-Created Open Educational Resources

As stewards of knowledge, researchers must convey their findings to the general public. Our current academic apprenticeship model falls short of this goal, producing scientists that are deeply embedded in the jargon of a highly specialized subject. While scientific contributions can have broad-reaching effects, the language, style, and format of scientists’ communication is often an obstacle in communicating with the general public. Writing for a textbook, which conveys a great deal of information to an audience that falls somewhere between expert and general public, may prove a useful tool for broadening researchers’ perspectives and ability to communicate concepts in plain language. In this chapter, a Neuroscience professor and scholarly communications librarian will describe a student-created open access textbook.

Teaching Wikipedia: A Model for Critical Engagement with Open Information

In this chapter, the authors describe the learning experience and goals of a class assignment to write content for Wikipedia about women in science and technology fields. The authors, a university professor and two librarians, collaboratively developed this assignment to allow students to engage in rigorous research and contribute to the visibility of women scientists by writing content for the web. The authors chose the Wikipedia platform as the means to make the students’ work openly available because of its ubiquity and the potential for student work to make an important impact. The assignment, used in two iterations of the course, was designed to provide students not only with a hands-on experience on working on the open web, but also with tools to assess critically the uses and abuses of open access platforms.

Harnessing the Power of Student-Created Content: Faculty, Librarians Collaborating in Open Ed

Two librarians and a faculty member applied for and received a grant, administered by the Libraries, to support OER creation on campus, determine the needs of faculty creating OERs, and ascertain how these projects impact the undergraduate experience. Through this grant, two faculty members are currently leading student-developed projects that use open pedagogy to fill a void in terms of available course texts and ancillaries. In this chapter we describe one of those projects, a purely student-generated textbook for an undergraduate 3000-level Hispanic linguistics course, and we discuss the impact and power of the project on undergraduate student learning. This project illustrates how librarians, faculty, and students can collaborate in order to create OER that fill important needs and provide students with engaging learning experiences.

Sharing the End of the World: Students’ Perception of Self-Efficacy in Creating Open Access Objects

Authors discuss the collaborative teaching and research model for an experimental Honors course,“Politics of the End of the World.” In this course, students investigate the role of politics in the end of the world, looking through the political science lens to investigate an interdisciplinary topic. The final assignment has student groups creating an episode of a podcast series, speaking to the kind, role, and nature of the apocalypse they are focusing on. The professor is interested in utilizing the podcasts for future teaching tools; a problem in that institutions aren’t supporting the hosting and dissemination of digital student scholarship (multimedia specifically) very well, if at all, and this needs to become a more prominent discussion in the context of the open pedagogy movement.

Building a Collection of Openly Licensed Student-Developed Videos

In this chapter, I introduce an assignment from an undergraduate agriculture class that undermines the argument for mere content access only. Now in its fifth year, this student video project has evolved beyond basic instruction which first accompanied the assignment to now include complex pedagogical design and thoughtfully designed learning outcomes. In the first year, the assignment included directions for finding open access content to integrate into videos- such as music, photos and film footage. It now includes accompanying instruction on the tools and processes capable of creating, modifying and distributing such content, including open pedagogical practices, open source tools and open licenses.

Whose History?: Expanding Place-Based Initiatives through Open Collaboration

This chapter is a case study of a collaboration between the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Teaching & Learning Program and the University Library’s Special Collections. The collaboration, Whose History? uses place-based education (PBE) as the pedagogical underpinning of a multi-stage project of student-developed research, creation, and teaching. While PBE underpins the project, “openness” is the framework around which Whose History? is built. Teaching & Learning undergraduate students use special collections resources to conduct research into regional history and culture and then create open lesson plans from their findings. Select teacher-candidates teach their lessons in area classrooms, and exemplary lesson plans are published online as open educational resources, with project facilitators guiding OER creation.

Library Support for Scaffolding OEP in a General Education Science Course

This chapter describes the collaboration between an adjunct professor of CORE 101: Scientific Investigations, and a Scholarly Communications Librarian & Assistant Professor at Roger Williams University (RWU) in which OER-enabled pedagogy has been incorporated into a general education science course for non-science majors. The overarching goal of this collaboration has been to replace the course’s static and ‘disposable’ final paper and poster presentations with Google Sites that will serve as learning objects developed by non-science majors, for non-science majors. Students voluntarily opt to openly-license their Sites, which permits each subsequent semester’s cohort of students in CORE 101 to contribute to the expansion of this scholarship, dependent on their own relevant areas of interest.

Open Pedagogical Design Projects

Invitation to Innovation: Transforming the Argument-Based Research Paper to Multimodal Project

At the University of Rochester, all students must satisfy the Primary Writing Requirement (PWR). The vast majority of students take one of the 4-credit, theme-based WRT 105 courses, typically during their first year of college. While students demonstrate their research and writing through their written formal assignments which are uploaded on Blackboard, the work is ultimately for a singular audience - the instructor. By transforming their paper into an interactive, multimodal presentation, students are able to disseminate their knowledge to a wider academic community. Through generating a unique, student-driven interpretation of their research, students engage more deeply not only with their content, but the academic community as a whole. In this way, students are not just consumers of information, but creators of knowledge.

Evolving into the Open: A Framework for Collaborative Design of Renewable Assignments

As the integration of OER within classes compels instructors to reconsider the assigned course materials, open pedagogy recasts the role of course assignments and activities students engage in within a course. Yet, many are grappling with how to create and redesign assignments to engage students in open pedagogy. In this chapter, we make a case for applying open pedagogy in teacher education coursework and, utilizing a specific case, describe a Renewable Assignment Design Framework that may be adapted by librarians and faculty when planning for open educational practices.

“What if we were to go?”: Undergraduates simulate the building of an NGO from theory to practice

In 2012, an Anthropology professor and her departmental librarian embarked on a new kind of course design at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo. Just as students entering the course were apprehensive for what the semester would bring, so too were the course instructors. The ensuing chapter will detail the history of how the Anthropology course, Third World Development, took shape in the spirit of open pedagogical design and practices, pulling from the distinctive but collaborative and complementary teaching approaches of the professor and librarian team. A 2014 SUNY Geneseo graduate who enrolled in the course, will reflect on her experience taking the course and how her simulated non-governmental organization (NGO) built their project.

Adventures in a Connectivist MOOC on Open Learning

This chapter describes a librarian’s experience working with teaching faculty to create a program to support faculty development through an online Hub website and connectivist Massive Open Online Course (cMOOC). A cMOOC is a particular type of MOOC, grounded in connectivist principles where learners co-create knowledge and connect through social media such as blogs and social networks (McCauley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010). The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how a connectivist MOOC and innovation hub website provided a robust environment for professional development over the course of three years. The story reveals how a librarian was able to contribute to such a project, and eventually step up to lead the cMOOC in its final iteration.

Open Pedagogical Design for Graduate Student Internships, a New Collaborative Model

Within the nexus of library and graduate student needs, the innovative Smathers Graduate Student Internship Program remakes graduate student internships within the libraries through a design based on collaboration with teaching department faculty and library faculty. Through this program, launched in 2015, librarians propose and lead internships, based upon identified and specific needs for projects within the library, in collaboration with teaching faculty. With a new model for an institutionally-integrated, formalized program, the structures and process are enabling for outcomes for interns, internship directors, and collaborators, with final work that can be showcased publicly by students and that benefits the library and its communities. The program follows open pedagogical design.

Open Pedagogical Practices to Train Undergraduates in the Research Process: A Case Study

In this chapter, we discuss the design and pedagogical background of a research-oriented course that engages students from a variety of disciplines in the practice of critical thinking, where information, data, research, and digital literacies are their tools. This course was developed through collaboration between library and university faculty in order to meld pre-existing independent learning experiences into a single course. Framed as a case study, the “openness” of the course design outlined here stems from the open resources used, the autonomy of the enrolled students, and the pedagogical practices that promote diverse perspectives about transdisciplinary topics. Students produced research proposals and digital posters that were made openly accessible through a library-housed online repository.

Resources

Participants