Open pedagogy describes teaching practices that
- commit to learner-driven education that is access-oriented, and
- enable students to engage in the field of public knowledge and content creation through assignments and learning tools.
Open pedagogy can include creating, adapting, or updating OER with students, building course policies, outcomes, assignments, rubrics, and schedules of work collaboratively with students, or facilitating student-created and student-controlled learning environments.
Read about the Attributes of Open Pedagogy
KPU Open Supports
UN SDG Open Pedagogy Fellowship
This fellowship connects faculty with interdisciplinary and cross-institutional partners to impact change through the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Why Participate in Open Pedagogy?
Evidence suggests that Open Pedagogy leads to positive student outcomes, such as development of critical thinking skills, greater self-direction, and increased enjoyment of education. Open pedagogy enables faculty to grow as educators and create more collaborative, engaging learning experiences for students.
Open Pedagogy Encourages
Sharing
Freely sharing content and knowledge disrupts capital-based knowledge structures that prioritize profit over information access and retention.
Personalized Learning
Giving authority to learners to determine what is learned, how it is learned, how mastery is demonstrated, and when learning takes place. Students discover their own agency as learners.
Transparency
Transparency provides an avenue for those in the learning process to understand how knowledge has been constructed and how a learner’s own positionality affects their biases, beliefs, and viewpoints.
Collaborative knowledge construction
Recognizing that knowledge construction is not a closed process determined by those in authority, but information is continually added by learners providing valuable insight.
Learner empowerment
Fundamentally shifting the 'traditional' classroom space to one where learner and faculty work in harmony with each other to create a learning experience valuable to each individual.
Deconstructing traditional power structures
Evaluating and evolving power structures in the educational environment, such as the traditional teacher-student relationship, giving voice to those in underrepresented groups, and moving instruction away from a deficit model of learning.
Wondering what open Pedagogy looks like in practice? Browse through the open Pedagogy Notebook
Adapted from The why of open pedagogy: a value-first conceptualization for enhancing instructor praxis by Eric Werth and Katherine Williams, licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
Open Pedagogy FAQs
Is using Open Education Resources (OERs) considered pedagogy?
While using OERs in your course is an example of open educational practices, open pedagogy specifically focuses on teaching approaches and the learning environment. Open pedagogy considers the philosophical and theoretical approaches for creating a student-centred, co-created, open environment, all of which go beyond providing resources.
What rights and control do students have over their work?
At KPU, students retain copyright for all works created during a course of study. If students are creating work under a contract or agreement with an instructor or the institution, copyright will be determined by the terms of the contract or agreement.
What are best practices for working with students?
- At KPU, students retain copyright for all works created during a course of study. If students are creating work under a contract or agreement with an instructor or the institution, copyright will be determined by the terms of the contract or agreement.
- When sharing content outside of traditional classrooms, people have different levels of comfort and risk. Students should never be required or compelled to give up any of their privacy in order to complete an assignment. It is always good to provide students with options on how they may complete or share their work.
- If you are publishing students’ work on a course site or planning to re-use it in future terms, ask for students’ permission regarding how long they would like their work shared. Some may not mind having it posted indefinitely, but some may wish to have their work taken down as soon as the class is finished. At the very least, let them know that if they later decide they would like it taken down, they can contact you.
- It is best practice to provide them with choices that will protect their privacy, such as:
- publishing with a pseudonym
- publishing in a way that only other people in that class can see their work
- submitting only to the instructor or T.A.
- publishing publicly with or without an open license
- When working with students as creators of content, it can be helpful to think of them as collaborators. You might not want your work or privacy shared without your consent and students are often the same
Some FAQ content has been adapted from the Open Pedagogy Toolkit by UBC, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Interested in engaging with open pedagogy but not sure where to begin? We're happy to help!