Open Digital Pedagogy: Beyond the Practical
Jenna Spevack
“Open digital pedagogy is the use of cost-free, publicly available online tools and platforms by instructors and students for teaching, learning, and communicating in support of educational goals.” - Rosen, J., & Smale, M. (2015). Open Digital Pedagogy=Critical Pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy
In the late 1990s, I was an animator for Sesame Street Interactive, creating educational CD-ROM and web-based games. Not long after my transition from educational publishing to public education, I was in the children’s section of the Brooklyn Public Library when I heard my disembodied voice emanating from a corner of the space. I glanced over to see a group of young children huddled in front of a computer. Surprisingly, they were interacting with a shape and color game I had worked on years earlier. As an animator, I had not considered that these then-emerging media could only be used by families and institutions with the technology and the means to access them. Viewing the scene through my new public educator lens led me to discover the value of educational access, openness, and equity in the subsequent years. With the following reflection, I hope to motivate experiential, practice-based educators like myself to explore both the practical and theoretical approaches to open digital pedagogy.
A Practical Beginning
When I started teaching interactive media at New York City College of Technology (City Tech) in 2002, internet use was quickly expanding, but many of my colleagues in design education still relied on printed textbooks. The web design course syllabus I was given recommended a textbook that was nearly out of date by the time it went to press, so rapidly were changes taking place in the field. Since the majority of my students came from low-income families, recommending an expensive textbook that might soon be out of date seemed wasteful and unproductive. I was aware of the move in some fields toward open educational resources (O.E.R.), both pragmatic and idealistic, and I observed the academic discussions around intellectual property, fair use, and the newly developed Creative Commons. But like many new faculty, I did not have the time to fully engage. I had a practical need to provide my students with relevant content in a format that was easily updatable and freely accessible.
To meet this need, I built a website to host my web, digital illustration, and animation courses. These courses and others are archived on my website from 2002 to the present, providing students with access during their college career and beyond. I saw this online resource as a tool to distribute collected knowledge, and when new faculty came on board, I invited them to use my site content to build their courses or to share directly with their students. Occasionally, I received messages from educators in other parts of the country inquiring if they could use my site as a resource in their classrooms. Communications from past students let me know they still used the course resources, and I incorporated their suggestions into the next iteration of the site. As a web design educator with a passion for accessible design, it seemed logical that educational resources should be easily available and shareable. In retrospect, this early O.E.R. demonstrated a practical solution for the need for access, but it did not yet integrate the theoretical concepts of open digital pedagogy.
The Theoretical in Practice
My work on the design and development of City Tech’s OpenLab over the last eight years has influenced my thinking about educational openness. This open, digital platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration, was created by and for City Tech students, faculty, alumni, and staff using open source software, BuddyPress and WordPress. Beyond being a tool for creating O.E.R., the OpenLab is a community within which these resources can be shared, remixed, and reused as part of a collaborative learning experience.
The OpenLab sits at the intersection of the practical and the theoretical. It is a place where the voices of both students and faculty are embraced and integrated into the functional fabric of the community. For example, our development process is an iterative one that relies heavily on member input. We observe the needs and listen to requests from our members and then work to design solutions to improve the platform over time. In this spirit, we have released Commons in a Box - OpenLab, a free plugin modeled after City Tech’s OpenLab that allows institutions around the world to build their own commons for open learning.
As OpenLab Co-Director, I have learned that there is more to openness than making course content available and shareable. There is significant value in empowering students to actively participate in their education by using publicly available technology to learn, collaborate, and contribute to these educational resources.
Facilitating Open Learning
Alongside my role as OpenLab Co-Director, I have broadened my pedagogy to include collaborations with Professor Jody Rosen through City Tech’s First Year Learning Community program. In our course, “Ways of Seeing,” for first-semester design students enrolled in English Composition 1 and Graphic Design Principles 1, we aim to bring learning into the open by encouraging peer-to-peer critique, project reflections, and crowdsourced projects on our shared publicly accessible OpenLab course site.
Facilitating open learning is challenging, especially with freshmen who are struggling to make the transition from high school to college. But I have found that students benefit creatively and socially from the simple practice of documenting, sharing, and reflecting on their creative process through posts and comments on our site. One example of this practice is their shared Visual Library, which they contribute to each week. Students are prompted to post an image of something - anything - that demonstrates their unique ways of seeing the world. We then discuss and critique the images using design vocabulary in class. It is a low-stakes activity, but it brings the cultures and perspectives of the students into the classroom, gives value to their creative voices and vision, and builds the learning community both online and in person.
While designing a new course in Communication Design Theory, I included the use of OpenLab to enable access to course content, peer critiques, class discussions, and research writing and reflection. As the course coordinator, I joined the City Tech Library’s O.E.R. Fellowship program intending to build a collection of readings to share with other faculty teaching the course. In the process, I discovered that the relatively young field of communication design theory had a limited number of openly licensed resources and even fewer authored by people from diverse ethnicities and cultures.
After building out the architecture of the Communication Design OER site, I sought to create a method for students and faculty to contribute to the course content over time, allowing the course to evolve to incorporate the voices and perspectives of the students. I added a suggestion form and invited students and faculty across multiple course sections to contribute readings and their own publicly available research. There are many excellent examples of this pedagogical approach in other fields. I look forward to seeing how this and other O.E.R. can be integrated into City Tech’s Communication Design curriculum with the hope that faculty will adopt critical pedagogical methods and inspire students to openly publish their work and share their unique perspectives with future students, faculty, and design researchers.
As an educator, designer, and artist, I am grounded in the practice of creative problem solving and design thinking. My practical approaches serve me well, but by engaging more fully with the concepts of educational access, openness, and equity, my pedagogy has evolved and deepened. I encourage other faculty to move beyond the practical, explore the pedagogical theories and ethics of openness, and bring open digital pedagogy into their teaching practice.
Jenna Spevak is a Professor of Communication Design at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech), and Co-Director of the OpenLab.