Showcase Blog ~ Blog #4

This weeks reading was really interesting and I think connected to a lot of things we have discussed in this course.

First, I really enjoyed Mai’s (1978) explanation of open pedagogy as a “informal classroom where children might be trusted to learn by exploring according to their own interests, instead of being bored, demeaned, and alienated”. This really resonates with me and my own teaching practice as I think students are far more engaged in their learning when they have a say in what they are learning, rather than being told what to learn and how to learn it. Moreover, I really appreciated how this reading provided more context to the 5 R’s in OER we learned about last week. I think open pedagogy is important in allowing students to feel like their voice and their work is valued. When using open pedagogy to create OER, students are consciously contributing to the learning network and therefore allows them to feel like people value their knowledge and expertise.

The term ‘openwashing’ was interesting to me and it reminded me of topic 1 readings and the broad use of the term ‘privacy’. Some resources or websites claim to be ‘open’ but in fact are not actually open as they do not follow the 5 R’s, the same way some edtech companies use the term ‘privacy’ but in fact users do not have complete ‘privacy’. 

Further, I really appreciated Wiley’s notion of “renewable assignments” , describing them as “assignments which both support an individual student’s learning and result in new or improved open educational resources that provide a lasting benefit to the broader community of learners.” Wiley’s 4 part test used to determine if a specific learning or teaching practice qualifies as OER-enabled pedagogy is a great tool, however I’m not sure I’ve ever had an assignment that checks off every question. I have written essays that have been used as a guide for students but it was never publicly shared or licenced. To be honest, I’m not sure I know how to licence my own work. Moreover, in my own teaching practice, I’m not sure I would ensure my assignments passed all parts of the test as the last two raise privacy concerns. I think there are ways around protecting students’ privacy when publicly sharing their work (like a nickname for example) but I’m not sure how licencing their work to them would be possible. Additionally, another reason I may be hesitant to allow students to share their work publicly is feedback from strangers. Of course if the work is published in a way where users can’t comment, this wouldn’t be an issue. I really appreciate the idea of students not only having more ownership and control over their work, but also collectively helping each other learn. I’d like to integrate this pedagogy as much as I can because I do want my students to feel like their work is valued and worth sharing. I think renewable assignments can be done at an elementary level, such as allowing students to collectively build and contribute to a class blog/website. All students past, present, and future would be contributing to the learning network. However, I found it interesting that the article stated that Ehlers (2011) identified a need for further research as to the efficacy of OER because some believed “because OER are free of cost, they are necessarily inferior to commercial alternatives and that students who use OER would learn less” and contrarily, some argued that “open textbooks would dramatically improve student learning as students gained greater access to learning resources.”. While I agree with the latter, the article states that 6 years later, studies found a small positive impact on learning. I do still think integrating an OER-enabled pedagogy as much as possible is beneficial, I just think further research still needs to be conducted.