Research Guides: Open Pedagogy: For Faculty

Introduction

This section is designed for instructors and librarians who want to bring open pedagogy into their teaching.

Here you’ll find rationales for using renewable assignments, practical course-level strategies, sample practices, tools, and readings to support the design, implementation, and assessment of open pedagogy projects.

Talking with Students About Sharing

Ethical open pedagogy emphasizes choice:

Students should always have the option not to share their work publicly.
Students who do share can choose pseudonyms or limited access.
Conversation about potential audiences, risks, and benefits should come early in the assignment.

A short classroom activity can walk students through examples of licenses, sample attribution statements, and options for keeping work private, semi-open (e.g., class only), or fully open.

Collaboration & Public Scholarship

Open pedagogy encourages students to engage in public or semi-public scholarly conversation. Examples include:

Class blogs or multi-author course websites.
Online exhibits of student work.
Public “gallery walks” of projects, either on campus or online.
Synchronous or asynchronous conversations with authors, experts, or practitioners.

Here, instructors act more as facilitators and coaches, asking guiding questions and supporting students as they navigate audience, tone, and ethical sharing.

Getting Started

Open pedagogy can be woven into a course gradually. Possible strategies include:

Co-creating community agreements or a short portion of the syllabus with students.
Letting students vote on one or two topics or case studies to include.
Offering at least one assignment that can be completed as an open, shareable project.
Having students build or update a small resource (like a FAQ) for future classmates.

Assessment in open pedagogy can combine traditional measures with reflection on process and impact. In addition to grading rubrics, consider asking students to:

Reflect on how their understanding changed while creating work for a real audience.
Describe how they made decisions about what to share and how to license it.
Provide peer feedback on clarity, usefulness, and accessibility of each other’s work.

To redesign an assignment as open and renewable, you might:

Identify an existing assignment that already asks students to synthesize or create.
Ask: Who else could benefit from this work?
Adjust the prompt so the product is useful to that audience.
Build in reflection about audience, voice, and ethics.
Discuss sharing options and Creative Commons choices with students.
Decide on a platform (course site, wiki, repository, etc.) for work that students choose to publish.