Browse examples of open pedagogy on the Open Pedagogy Notebook and on this workshop site. Brainstorm and jot down several ideas for open pedagogy activities or assignments that you could design for one of your courses. You might adapt examples you read about or come up with something new.
We encourage you to share your ideas in the comments below, along with any questions you have about designing open pedagogy activities and assignments.
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44 thoughts on “How might you use open pedagogy in your course?”
In my introductory course to criminal justice, student groups learning about warrantless searches would create OER material in the form of fact patterns, questions to analyze the fact patterns, and answers to the questions
For my Sociology of Dispute and Conflict Resolution course, I could see assigning an activity pertinent to the importance of differentiating among and understanding positions, needs and interests of parties in conflict. I could ask students to choose any recent story in the news that reflects conflict and write a paragraph identifying the position, needs and interests of each party.
I am teaching an undergraduate course on young adult literature and I am considering asking my students to do a book review of a young adult book that they can either complete as a YouTube video or a blog post. I am hoping this activity will help them get a sense of (and perhaps become part of) the vibrant, dynamic YA community that exists outside the classroom. I also plan to involve my students in designing a document where we outline the objectives and parameters of the assignment. I would like them to get a sense of what it means to share their ideas with a larger audience; respond to and perhaps workshop their classmates’ work; and become familiar with the genre of the book review so we can interrogate its gatekeeping function.
I will be teaching an undergraduate course on young adult literature in Fall 2020 and I plan to ask my students to produce a book review of a YA novel that they recently read. The reviews will be published on a public platform like YouTube or WordPress; the public site will hopefully enable my students to practice imagining/defining the audience of the content they produce. By sharing their work online, my students will also have an opportunity to engage with vibrant, dynamic online communities of YA readers, fans, and critics.
My students and I will design the assignment together, collaborating as we set parameters and identify objectives of the book review. As we collaborate on the assignment design, I hope to students and I will 1) gain familiarity with the genre of the book review; 2) discuss how this assignment can have meaning and purpose beyond the course; 3) discuss how book reviews—often used for literary gatekeeping—can be used to promote the voices, knowledges, and experiences of marginalized authors and communities.
In my gen ed world lit course, I have students use the social annotation tool, hypothesis.is, to collaboratively annotate course readings. Together, they decide the themes and questions that emerge from the text that they want to discuss when we meet together. We use their annotations to determine class discussions and also develop ideas for writing and other projects we will pursue together.
I am having some trouble determining how to use open pedagogy in introductory science classes where certain points need to be understood before moving on to the more advanced classes. I am hoping to learn about these things in this workshop.
A small attempt at open pedagogy I want to try this semester is posting all reading on my college’s Manifold site and having students annotate as part of their readings. I want them to engage in having a shared reading assignment that is peppered with their thoughts and questions instead of the traditional way of having them engage in reading alone.
Two ideas that I want to try in the future are providing incentives to publish work from class and creating a class journal. The first idea would simply be making a promise that any paper adapted for an extracurricular project (student newspaper, self-published blog, etc.) would be rewarded full points (if you’re publishing something for a wide audience, makes sense to have full marks). The second idea is for a composition class I teach in the Spring. A major component of that class is writing a research paper. I’m considering whether to develop it as a self-published journal and have students work as editors and peer reviewers. At the end of the semester, students would have the experience of making a real publication from all their hard work, rather than seeing their essays be another ‘wasted’ assignment.
I am teaching Biology for non-science students and this is really a hard subject for them! One of my ideas is to give topics (related with students every day lives) and ask them to write about in blogs!
For my Gerontology class, I would create an assignment where my students would either annotate the experiences of some elderly participants from their family or community. This could be in the form of a recording of conversations or through pictures. The idea would be to explore through the art of the experience the “rich” lives of this vulnerable population.There stories would show how the elderly was once the strength of the community and the evolution process they are experiencing.
I was very excited to read “Collaborative Syllabus Design: Students at the Center.” I learned about how this idea can be done easily–in my mind it seemed very complicated. I think I will use this approach to my course in the fall. I really like the idea of students choosing a topic to teach to the class instead of me predetermined every single topic. Since my course in the fall is a beginner course, I think this will be fairly easy to do. I would love to see other examples of collaborative syllabi, if possible.
I am also hoping to learn about collaboration tools on and of Blackboard. I think it would be nice for students to peer review one another’s word. I’d love to have students annotate my work, but I’ve been using Google Slides instead of textbooks. I’m not sure how to make the annotations work.
I have always been cognizant of textbook prices in the courses I teach. My textbooks are online and inexpensive. I also allow them to use past editions of the textbook as a way of reducing the expense.
As far as learners as contributors, I have always had students see past students research outlines, both good and bad, that accompany researched presentations.
Additionally, I have always used videos to provide examples of excellent presentations and group discussions, however, after having seen the video and done the readings for this course, I have decided to also use my past students’ amazing presentations as well.
I am teaching a freshman seminar on the Arts in NYC this fall, which is typically oriented around field trips and experiential learning. I am beginning to tease out a project about having students do a hidden history project in their respective neighborhoods in which they will write or use media to tell the story of a cultural artifact. This might be a good avenue to collaborate on curating an online exhibit.
I like the idea of having students to create a testbank of questions and solutions. They can make up their own review sheet instead me doing it for them. Often times students are not able to relate topics in math to the real world.
They can collaboratively create mathematical modeling questions.
For my administration class, students would write ethical case studies to be addressed in class rather than using the text examples.
In my intro to Recreational Therapy course students might put together a final course portfolio to serve as a foundation for their future self to study for the National Certification exam.
I’m interested in implementing the collaborative syllabus design for my Selected Topics class this fall, my specialty area, Sexual Labor in Transnational Context. I have soooo many ideas for it, but this would put the students as co-creators, and help me see what interests them most. I am also excited by the digital storytelling project, but I worry about how to do so in an online course.
I worry about these things because we’re still in crisis; this is another crisis semester and many of our colleagues are acting like it’s not: we’re still in the middle of the COVID19 pandemic, we’re in an economic depression/recession, racism is overflowing right now with the presidential elections coming up, policy brutality, standing up fiercely against policy brutality: this is an intense, exhausting, overwhelming time. So I want to make sure if I implement something new-to-me that I’m doing so to make things easier on students, not harder. We’re all teaching online, and these are students who did not opt to be online, they’re different than the online learner who opts in to an online class. I’m allotting more time in my syllabi to just thinking and being, rather than acting and doing.
I am hoping to learn more about open pedagogy and how to incorporate it into the information literacy sessions that I will be expected to teach in the fall for Narrative Medicine. From the examples, I did like the Wiki assignment for the Women and Medicine course. I am currently a faculty librarian with CUNY School of Medicine.
I teach students about searching and finding digital objects and media for digital projects. This also requires teaching students the basics of copyright. I think two interesting ways that open pedagogy could be used is in a “teach your peers” type exercise to generate discussion about copyright; what they do and don’t understand as well as discussions of ownership. Another exercise would be to create a class-wide digital object management system. How would objects be titled/described/sorted, etc.
Pat Haggler, Medgar Evers College, CUNY
Assignment: Students will read about the role of Confederate General and later KKK Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest in the slaughtering of African-American Union soldiers at Fort Pillow during the Civil War and a July 27, 2020 newspaper article reporting that Rep. Will Dismukes of Alabama attended an event celebrating the birthday of Forrest in Alabama. Students will email Dismukes at his congressional email to discuss their feelings about his actions.
Assignment: Students will read the section in the OER assigned U.S. history textbook entitled “The New Negro” which gives an overview of African-American life in the U.S. in the 1920s. Students will be asked to research further one topic mentioned in the textbook (e.g., Harlem Renaissance, Red Summer, Marcus Garvey) and choose a video or journal article that could be added to the syllabus. Students will be given the choice to view or read one of the additional materials recommended by their peers.
I teach Chemistry of Cooking for non-science majors. We had a few assignments that fit Open Pedagogy approach: students created blogs, worked in groups to create meals, wrote exam questions. I am hoping that as I learn more about tools that we can use and produce a cooking show or cooking book.
Thinking about ways to structure my students’ involvement with the creation of the reading lists/anthology for the course since I was already committed to creating a digital one given distant learning and the cost of materials. Would like to incorporate students researching digital collections at various archive sites to locate material for presentations that could be “translated” or “transferred” to the anthology and final writing assignments. It is an American literature course for non-majors in which I plan to focus on diverse narratives set in New York City and writing/art by women.
I have some concerns about collaborative textbook creation that I will share in our workshop.
I’m teaching intro to literary studies in the fall, and I can imagine asking students to keep course blogs where they post regularly about their readings (rather than use a discussion board or a private reading journal). Students can then cite each other’s blog posts, as well as published scholarly work, in their essays. I’m also thinking of having students annotate course texts together and maybe even writing collaborative notes on the texts and class discussion. Another idea is to publish a class journal where students contribute their favorite essays. Students can serve as peer reviewers and collaboratively write an introduction and conclusion to the journal. This last idea might be too ambitious for the fall, so it might be better if I save it for a course further in the future.
The annotated bibliography assignment, described in the notebook, seems to be relevant to several criminal justice courses that I teach. It is a “fluid” assignment as the students contribute to it throughout the semester. It can be entirely based on the articles that come from the scholarly journals.
My class on graphic design will have students investigate designers that have not been included in the cannon. We can explore creating posts on The People’s graphic Design Archive.
I would like to completely eliminate the textbook in my Developmental Biology course next year, but it is not a minor task to compile the basic knowledge introductory materials required. Perhaps students could contribute to this compilation after some collective reflection about what is most relevant in order to understand how development works. I am interested in deemphasizing grading. I found the Teach More, Grade Less blog from Hollis Glaser and the pass non-pass assignment a feasible step in this direction.
One of the ideas that I would highly consider using for my Anatomy and Physiology course is to have my students create multiple choice questions and essay questions on the lessons that we cover. A colleague of mine does this for her Microbiology course and says that this activity really engages students and requires them to do a lot of critical thinking. She also chooses a series of questions from this pool of questions to use for her exams and students love seeing their questions on tests.
In response to your second paragraph, about the continuing emergency /crisis situation: I strongly agree! Let’s not make things harder for our students or ourselves. However, I am seeking a way to explicitly recognize, with my students, that a new reality is developing, we are in a new time, and how can we help it come into being.
For my Elementary French course, I would like students to keep a log/blog/journal where they reflect on the process of learning a language—what is easy, what is hard, how it feels, problems encountered and how to get over the difficulties. Or, more simply, a reflection paper toward the end of the semester thinking on the process of learning a language, with advice for others on the best way to go about learning a language.
I also like the idea of students creating questions for a test bank. I think they would enjoy working on that in groups. I would try to join each group briefly in order to discuss the pros and cons of the questions they have come up with.
I teach curriculum and pedagogy courses in which, one of the assignments requires that students collaborate in small groups to develop lesson and unit plans to be used in the High School Social Studies classroom. Open Pedagogy model would be ideal for students to use the web to locate content and teaching strategy resources and to view virtual samples of classrooms in which inservice teachers are demonstrating various strategies . The course assignment may be adapted to require students to produce a YouTube video in which they share the plans they developed.
I teach introductory business and business law courses. I am always sharing current news articles on relevant topics as we learn about them in the course to reinforce the topical and timely nature of the topics we study. I ask students to respond to the articles in discussion posts. I think I’d like to make this more student driven and aligned with open pedagogy principles by requiring the students to find the articles and prepare discussion prompts for their peers to respond to and then comment on each other’s reflections. Perhaps, I can assign groups of students to certain chapters in the course to make it more collaborative. I think this style will really bring out the students’ voices on these topics because creating the prompts will require them to really reflect on their perspective and understanding of the material.
I’m excited about all the information on Zines. I think I could use Zines for a project in my Graphic Principles class at CityTech.
In my Urban Sociology class this Fall I am going to develop a research project with my students exploring the urban protests. After we collectively go through a process of identifying one or more research questions, students will survey and/or interview people who participating in local BLM protests and those who chose not to. They will then develop a public platform (website, blog, zine) to share their results and conclusions.
In planning for converting my hybrid Literature of Witness class into all online, I’ve been looking at the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition “The Vietnam War: 1945-1975,” which has also gone online. I’ve already developed an assignment based on one of their murals to familiarize students with the geography of South Vietnam, but I’ve thought about asking students to peruse the rest of the site, especially the thematic slideshows, oral histories, and song lists. Working in groups or alone, they could choose a video or other document, argue for its importance to an understanding of the conflict, set it up for future students, and perhaps build an assignment around it.
I ask students/learners to do a simulation of disabling conditions, for a greater understanding of people they will provide services for. The learners are asked to do daily activities as well as participate in recreational activities, in wheelchairs, blindfolded, with ear plugs, etc. In the process of doing these activities, they will find ways of accomplishing what they are trying to do, by making modifications. While making modifications are covered in many textbooks, there is always a need for more and sometimes the modifications are very simple. I am contemplating having the students exercise the option to submit their findings in written format, as they always have in the past, but I will also provide the option of doing a video of the experience. Now, I am thinking that these findings could be shared, amongst classmates and potentially shared with a larger audience. How that will be accomplished, I am going to have to consider. I feel that this could be a powerful tool to connect learners to the needs of the community they will serve and to each other. This will make the experience dovetail with the demands of the world, they hope to enter as healthcare professionals.
I am teaching research methods and I am thinking to have students write a quick intro reference book on what is research and how we conduct research. Then split them into groups to conduct their own studies and publish results. Not sure where they would publish the results but we can certainly do a virtual conference for the College.
One of the learning goals in my Introduction to Psychology course is for students to begin to apply psychological knowledge to find solutions to diverse personal, interpersonal, community, and workplace issues. An possible assignment may be to have students engage in collaborative group work throughout the semester relating psychological topics of their choice to major trends in current social and moral issues.
In my medieval literature class, I use Spanish medieval coexistence and multiculturalism of three different religions to reflect on their own NYC experience. I asked them to identify traits not related to their own perceive heritage and then we discuss this as part of what it means hibridity and personal identity.
I always try to avoid exams substituting them for research papers; I am not sure if this practice could be defined as open pedagogy. As a Sociology professor, I teach methods and theory, and in both domains, training is essential to learn how to use research tools and to familiarize with theoretical frameworks. Once, a group of students did a final paperwork about “Collaborative tools to think and to work in the Net,” they upload all the research to Wikipedia. They were excited to be part of the on-line encyclopedia.
Furthermore, I would like to know the differences between open pedagogy and co-education. It is co-education, an aim or goal, and open pedagogy a methodology?
My students collaborate to create resources – so in an intro to narrative course, we would collaborate on a glossary and critical terms for narrative document; i a Shakespeare course we will collaborate on annotated bibliographies of primary and / or secondary texts.
Hi Lisa,
Since you’re using Google Slides, you could consider setting it up so that anyone with the link can comment. That would allow students to comment on your slides.
One very small intervention I’ve been using for years to promote collaboration and sharing of resources is to have students come up with individual lists of ten articles they might use to elaborate or complicate their analysis, and then ask them to switch lists and take at least one article from each of their classmates’ lists.
There are always a handful of students who find valuable sources this way, but even if they can’t find an easy match on a classmate’s list because they are working on different topics, the exercise of having to find something that could fit often helps them see new dimensions to their own topics.
It also helps them learn that they can share sources without fear of having the originality of their own work compromised.
When I last taught Social Psychology, I had my students find and submit online video clips from TV series/the news/movies/Ads that related to concepts we were discussing in class and write a 2-page paper answering several questions about how the clip demonstrated the concept (tying it to other related concepts as well) and an example from their own life, an. I provided students with a rubric and an example paper demonstrating how to complete the assignment. The result is I ended up with a huge library of short clips that I can use in the future when teaching Social Psych again to help students grasp the concepts in action across a myriad of contexts!
One assignment that I could ask my students to complete collaboratively is to create a children’s book for kindergarten students to help promote language development, literacy, and entertainment. This open pedagogy method would allow for the creation of many children’s books that could be used for critical analysis each semester.
What do I love about CUNY students, I love their diversity, and their culture. I love learning from them and they learning from my culture