Chapter 4. Open Pedagogy and Open Educational Resources

Open pedagogy directly addresses questions of access, and empowers students and faculty to pursue knowledge in whatever ways they prefer. Often facilitated by open source digital tools, open pedagogical practices such as teaching in networked spaces or open educational resources (OER) respond to growing concerns not only about the rising cost of textbooks, but also to the corporatization of learning spaces, and to questions of representation and authentic experience in teaching and learning experiences. This section suggests how faculty might open up their classrooms to local contexts, as well as how they might use open methods to question the power structures of production and financing behind many proprietary educational resources.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources are freely available, re-mixable, and reusable teaching and learning materials that college faculty may choose to use in place of textbooks, which in some fields can cost students significant amounts of money. In addition to reducing cost of attendance for students, OER adoption can also facilitate pedagogical innovation and experimentation, allowing faculty to curate a range of course materials to meet goals in the specific contexts of their courses. (For more on this, see this post on Visible Pedagogy

https://vp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2017/02/21/oers-thinking-beyond-the-textbook/).

For beginning instructors, developing an awareness of OER and how they’re deployed can create opportunities not only to respond to the needs of your students, but also potentially to work with others to design teaching and learning resources within your field. OER are now available for courses in a wide range of disciplines, with more being published every semester. To find OER that might be relevant for your course, check out online repositories such as OERCommons and OpenStax.

In recent years, there has been significant and growing interest in implementing OERs at CUNY. New York State began making a significant investment in OER during the 2017-2018 academic year, fueling a number of OER-related support and development initiatives across CUNY. To learn more about this investment, see http://open-nys.org/, and read about the Teaching and Learning Center’s work on OER here: https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/building-and-sustaining-infrastructure-for-open-educational-resources-and-open-pedagogy. You can also reach out to your campus library for more information about what OER are available in your field.

Integrating OER into courses may also create opportunities to use other open digital tools and platforms in your teaching. The Graduate Center has developed Manifold, an intuitive, collaborative platform for scholarly publishing and social annotation. Using Manifold, instructors can publish dynamic course editions of public domain texts and OER along with supplementary notes, files, images, videos and interactive content in a single project, and it supports collaborative annotations that allow students to “meet” in the margins of your texts.

Many professors at CUNY are moving towards these increasingly open teaching and learning strategies, often called Open Digital Pedagogy.

Open Digital Pedagogy

Open Digital Pedagogy (ODP) refers to a teaching philosophy and set of practices that value active student involvement in knowledge creation and teaching methods that foster engagement and critical thinking. Open Digital Pedagogy aims to connect the classroom to the outside world by drawing on students’ lived experiences and harnessing free and open digital tools to facilitate collaboration, sustained engagement, and active and networked learning.

By moving digital work off of closed systems onto more open platforms, Open Digital Pedagogy helps students develop digital literacy of tools they may use beyond your course. Open platforms connect more seamlessly to OER and digital tools provide opportunities to deepen engagement with these materials through annotation, sharing, and remixing. Open digital tools also allow students to engage in conversation with wider audiences to address public issues that connect to course content.

Open and digital approaches can be foundational to a course, used for a single assignment, or somewhere in-between. Instructors at all levels of experience can benefit from integrating open methods, which requires and benefits from the conscious interrogation of pedagogical choices. Those new to teaching with open tools should start small, and then build out as their comfort allows.

Some past examples of Open Digital Pedagogy at CUNY include:

• public-facing course sites built on the CUNY Academic Commons (see more in the “Courses” tab on the Commons homepage: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/courses/)

• Pressing Public Issues Project, in which faculty and students developed public art projects connected to course content;

• instructors replacing high or for-cost course materials with open educational resources (OER) that are free to use and remix; and

• using Manifold Publishing Platform for Teaching with social annotation (see more at http://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects).

To learn more about Open Digital Pedagogy at CUNY:

• Connect with the GC’s Open Educational Technologists, Krystyna Michael (kmichael@gc.cuny.edu) and Laurie Hurson (lhurson@gc.cuny.edu).

• Attend a workshop or connect with the GC’s Teaching and Learning Center.

• Explore the CUNY Academic Commons, the GC’s platform for open, networked teaching: http://cuny.is.

• Learn about CUNY’s in-house digital publishing platform: Manifold

https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/.

• Explore the scholarship of teaching and learning via such publications at The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Visible Pedagogy.

For more on methods to integrate ODP and OER into your courses, see the full section in this handbook “Educational Technology.”