Open Pedagogy

Open pedagogy emphasizes:

• Student agency – students help shape what they learn, how they learn it, and how their work is shared.
• Collaboration – knowledge is created in community rather than alone; peer work and co-authorship are encouraged.
• Transparency – goals, expectations, and processes are shared openly with students.
• Public engagement – learning products are often created for audiences beyond the instructor and the course.

This approach builds on traditions such as constructivist learning, critical pedagogy, and experiential learning, while explicitly foregrounding openness and shared knowledge creation.

A disposable assignment is one that both students and instructors understand will be used once and then thrown away—such as a quiz, a worksheet, or a paper that only the instructor ever reads.

A renewable assignment:

• Results in work that others can meaningfully use or learn from.
• Can be shared, cited, and built upon over time.
• Often lives outside the LMS (or at least is portable beyond it).

Simple examples include a public FAQ on a course topic, a student-written explainer for a local community, or a collaboratively written resource that future cohorts can revise and expand.

Why Open and Renewable?

Traditional assignments are often “disposable”: students complete them, instructors grade them, and then the work is discarded or hidden in a learning management system. Open pedagogy asks: What if the work students do could matter to someone besides the instructor?

Renewable assignments are designed so that student work has ongoing value—it can be read, reused, adapted, or built upon by future learners, community partners, or the broader public. This shift can:

• Increase motivation and engagement because students see real-world impact.
• Strengthen critical thinking and communication skills, as students write for authentic audiences.
• Contribute resources back to future learners and communities.

Renewable assignments can take many forms. For example:

• Public explainers and guides – students write short, accessible explanations of key concepts for future learners or community partners.
• Student-created study resources – glossaries, timelines, annotated bibliographies, or concept maps that are shared openly with future cohorts.
• Community-facing projects – policy briefs, local case studies, or data visualizations produced in partnership with community organizations.
• Wikipedia and knowledge-base contributions – students improve or create entries, practicing citation, synthesis, and neutral tone.
• Digital exhibits and portfolios – curated collections of student work that tell a story or document a theme.

Each of these can be designed to be shared publicly under a Creative Commons license if students consent.

• Students contribute to the creation of an open textbook that is then revised and built upon by students in future courses.
• Students create and/or edit Wikipedia articles to improve content coverage and quality in a subject area.
• Students create openly licensed instructional videos to improve understanding of course concepts for others in the class.
• Students design tests that are used to assess comprehension of course materials. 
• Students edit and revise the syllabus for a course.
• Students research and annotate images or texts that are openly licensed or in the public domain.
• Students create and publish a zine to discuss a theory, concept or provide practical guidance on a topic.
• More examples from Open Education Group: OER Enabled Pedagogy.