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, […]
Open Learning Experience Bingo 2.0
Learning experience bingo is a game invented to offer a way for people to consider how learning experiences — like activities, assignments, modules, or courses — might be “opened” in various ways. For example, a learning experience might be opened by enabling wider access to more people, more agency for people involved, or more possibilities […]
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 […]
A Little Empathy Goes a Long Way
“Chad, can I talk to you for a second?” It was 2:15pm. I use this time to get ready for my class the next day. I do my photocopying, get tests ready, come up with problems for the students, and basically decompress from the events of the day. As I was head down in a […]
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Open Pedagogy Assignments
Montgomery College is fully committed to social justice and innovation through its focus on open pedagogy. Faculty from various disciplines and across campuses at the institution are working in teams to create several renewable assignments (which have a Creative Commons license) for deployment in their courses. The conceptual framework on which this work is based […]
Student-Created Group Genetics Worksheet
In this assignment students first look up a genetic condition in Genetics Home Reference (which is a public domain site maintained by the National Institute of Health). Then they give a description of the condition and make a problem based on the condition for other students to solve. Right now it is a Google document, […]
Why have students answer questions when they can write them?
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 […]
Create an Open Textbook
Below is an example of an open textbook creation project assigned by professor Anna Andrzejewski at University of Wisconsin. While this assignment is specific to Art History, it could easily be adapted to other disciplines and your own classroom learning objectives. Assignment #2 followed an earlier project in which each student focused on a phase […]
Expand an Open Textbook
Below is a teaching guide from Dr. Julie Ward at University of Oklahoma for instructors wishing to expand an existing open textbook project in their classes. While this project is specific to Spanish literature, the advice is relevant to similar projects in other disciplines. CRITICAL EDITION ASSIGNMENT IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE Welcome to the Antología Abierta de Literatura Hispana (AALH) team! […]
Murder, Madness, and Mayhem
The University of British Columbia‘s class SPAN312 (“Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation”) contributed to Wikipedia during Spring 2008. The collective goals were to bring a selection of articles on Latin American literature to featured article status (or as near as possible). By project’s end, they had contributed three featured articles and […]
