I recently trialled a new assignment in my Social Psychology class: During each of the 10 weeks when there was no scheduled exam I asked my students to write multiple-choice questions. That’s right, they wrote questions instead of merely answering them. From a pedagogical perspective, I really wanted my students to achieve a deeper level of understanding (e.g., the level it […]
Search Results for: questions
An Open Companion to Early British Literature
This digital textbook was developed through an “open pedagogy” approach with over 100 Austin Community College students contributing footnotes, introductory chapters, digital learning objects, and test bank questions with a student audience in mind. 86 chapters cover 1,000 years of British literature featuring primary source texts commonly assigned for survey courses of British Literature (ENGL […]
Non-majors Science Students as Content Creators
For the past three semesters, students in CORE101: Scientific Investigations at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI have been creating websites on science topics they themselves have deemed important to society. The websites are designed to take the place of a course textbook in this course for non-majors, and are completely written, designed, and edited […]
Students Creating a Shared Annotated Bibliography
Fall semester 2018, first-year students in Integrated Thinking and Writing, ITW-101, section 27 (I called it “Can’t Stay Here!”) at Keene State College in New Hampshire have been collaborating on research about immigration and refugees in the European context. While immigration is a contentious topic in U.S. politics (at the time of writing this post, […]
Zines as Open Pedagogy
Often, when speaking about open pedagogy, the emphasis is on the digital: frequently listed examples include Wikipedia edit-a-thons, blog posts, and collectively annotated works. Yet the same principles (transparency, self-driven learning, student empowerment) are also strongly found in zines, a print medium that has long thrived in underground spaces and activist movements. There are many […]
Collaborative Syllabus Design: Students at the Center
“Democratically co-creating learning outcomes with students, based on their goals for the class, situates them at the center of your pedagogy.” – Christina Katapodis I have been meaning to write about collaborative syllabus design for ages. This week’s workshop on learner-centered syllabi in GEDI / Grad 5114 combined with a very cool article by Christina Katopodis on Writing […]
If It Aint Broke, Break It!
Faux Punk Fatigue I’ve been teaching trades now for over nine years. I’ve got some pretty tried and true systems set up. I keep all my worksheets, notes, video links, powerpoints, and lesson plans in Evernote (I’d be dead if Evernote just closed up shop and ran). My lesson plans are meticulous. I have the […]
Against “Product-Based Learning”: Open Texts are Never Finished
This year, I am part of faculty group tasked with designing, piloting, and assessing a new capstone to our General Education program. We are imagining this capstone as an “integrated” course, one that brings together students from a range of majors to work in multidisciplinary groups on an outward-facing project. In our initial meeting, the […]
How Public? Why Public?
In the Interdisciplinary Studies program where I have begun working, we encourage students to go public with their work. It’s a common idea well beyond interdisciplinary studies: for students to feel more engaged with the work they do, to feel that what they are doing matters, they need to do that work for an audience […]
Editing Wikipedia in the Classroom: Individualized Open Pedagogy at Scale
Strada and Gallup released a study last month, From College to Life: Relevance and the Value of Higher Education, which seeks to understand students’ perspectives on the value of their higher education. It’s the first national study of its kind, drawing data from more than 250,000 interviews with people from more than 3,000 educational programs. Subjects, […]