Open pedagogy is often based in informal learning, where learners tailor their learning pathway to suit their own needs. Open Educational Resources (OER), free-to-access resources that are available to Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute as defined by David Wiley’s four R’s (Hegarty, 2015, p.3), are key in facilitating Open Educational Practices (OEP). In OEP, learning is facilitated by both teachers and peers and requires openness, connectedness, trust, and innovation. 

Hegarty cites Conole in outlining five principles necessary for openness, and therefore necessary for OEP:

  1. Collaboration and sharing of information
  2. Connected communication about learning and teaching
  3. Collectivity to grow knowledge and resources
  4. Critique for the promotion of scholarship
  5. Serendipitous innovation (2015, p. 3)

The openness required for OEP largely leads to self-driven learning in an experiential and constructivist design, scaffolded by teachers who help guide and consult with learners along the way. These principles of openness create a foundation for the eight attributes of OEP:

  1. Participatory technologies
  2. People, openness, and trust
  3. Innovation and creativity
  4. Sharing ideas and resources
  5. Connected community
  6. Learner-generated
  7. Reflective practice
  8. Peer review (Hegarty, 2015)

Each of these attributes can occur separately but are holistically interconnected when employed for OEP. OEP reaches beyond simply using OER – learners construct their knowledge and contribute to each other’s development. 

In our Interactive Learning Resource (ILR), my pod designed our lesson utilizing OER, but not entirely aligned with an OEP design. 

All of our learning resources are free to access online, as is our ILR itself. Participatory technologies, one of the eight attributes of OEP, are a large part of our ILR as it is web- and blog-based, including the practice quizzes and the student-student interactive writing assignment. 

As our ILR is designed more with a direct instruction approach, the remaining attributes of OEP are not incorporated into it as strongly. I think that if we were to expand our ILR to be a part of a bigger lesson plan, building upon the other OEP attributes would be beneficial to the learning process. Because our ILR teaches parallelism in English writing, an OEP design could help teach learners how to incorporate literary devices, such as parallelism, into their writing to develop style rather than simply teaching learners how to identify parallelism.

– SC

 

 

References

Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of open pedagogy: A model for using open educational resources. Educational Technology, 55(4), 3-13. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/44430383?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents