Open & Affordable Educational Resources Guide

Definition

OER also go beyond openly licensed textbooks and ancillary materials created by faculty. They also include what is called open pedagogy: OER created by students via renewable assignments for a class. In open pedagogy, faculty request and students agree to openly license and publicly share their completed assignments. As such, the now open and renewable assignment benefits not only the student but also potentially others, such as future students, who can now read, use, respond to, add to, and develop the assignment with their own openly licensed work. These student-created OER are therefore inherently co-created and collaborative. 

Examples

For instance, rather than have students take a test, an open pedagogy assignment would have students create a test. Or rather than have students read a textbook by faculty, which perhaps makes students mere consumers of knowledge, an open pedagogy assignment would require students to write an open textbook, thus making them also producers of knowledge by having the students research the subject matter and collaboratively co-author the textbook, which later iterations of students can then revise, add to, and develop, and so on. Similarly, an open pedagogy assignment might require students to revise existing open textbooks, customizing them or making examples and evidence less biased and more inclusive, etc. 

Further examples include:

• student-authored encyclopedias and dictionaries that are researched, written, revised, and updated iteratively by each class of students. 
• student-created tutorials that teach a topic to their peers and future students, who in turn revise those tutorials for their peers and future students, and so on.
• student-created / revised anthologies and critical / scholarly editions, in which students gather texts and supplementary materials that are in the public domain or openly licensed; research and write introductions, notes, and glosses; and create a critical apparatus of analytical visualizations, etc.

Issues: Exploitation of Student Labor

Open pedagogy risks exploiting students because of power inequities between faculty and students. Examples include:

• Making open mandatory rather than an equal choice
  • Students may not feel comfortable refusing open pedagogy, given power differentials and fear of offending faculty
• Inadequately compensating or crediting student labor

For more information and a set of guiding principles, see UCLA's "A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights."