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Dr. Robin DeRosa is a professor of English at Plymouth State University and editor of Hybrid Pedagogy, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that combines the strands of critical pedagogy and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses for technology and new media in education (About Robin DeRosa, 2016). In this short video, she touches on the key aspects of open education and reasons why they may be appealing to educators.

CC by 3.0]]

Defining open pedagogy is challenging. Some would say that open access and permissions for re-use are key: "Open pedagogy is that set of teaching and learning practices only possible in the context of the free access and 5R permissions characteristic of open educational resources." David Wiley: Defining Open Pedagogy

Others would offer a broader definition: Looking at open pedagogy as a general philosophy of openness (and connection) in all elements of the pedagogical process, while messy, provides some interesting possibilities. Open is a purposeful path towards connection and community. Open pedagogy could be considered as a blend of strategies, technologies, and networked communities that make the process and products of education more transparent, understandable, and available to all the people involved. - Tom Woodward in an excerpt from an interview in Campus Technology

5R Permissions

5R Permissions for Open - Lumen Learning CC:BY 4.0

Whatever your definition, open pedagogy relies on a structure of permissions to engage in the following activities:

• Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
• Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
• Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Open Pedagogy builds Web literacy

"4Cs of Open Learning" - Created by Cindy Underhill, CC by 3.0

Open pedagogy (as described by Dr. Robin DeRosa in the video above) includes learners as contributors to knowledge not just consumers of knowledge. By actively creating open, public and re-usable resources for public audiences, students learn what it means to authentically contribute to a body of knowledge.

The 4 C's of Open Learning (Connect, Create, Curate and Contribute) is one representation of what learners and faculty do and learn through the process of working in the open. These approaches help build web literacies - important for living, working and learning and conducting research in the world today.

Open approaches can enrich our teaching, open the doors to professional opportunities and connect learners with learning activities that have impact long after the course is over.

Read on to learn more.

Open networks help build connections

• Participate in a community of educators: Social networks and open projects offer opportunities for collaboration with other instructors on teaching and research projects.
• Learn from others: Many educators appreciate the opportunity to learn from what others have done, to talk about what works and what doesn't, and to get new ideas for their own practice.
• Connect learners with authentic audiences. This can range from students creating resources to be used by their peers to contributing resources to a community organization to contributing to knowledge by editing articles in Wikipedia. Arguably this approach can increase learning motivation and even achievement. Helping students learn how to engage with and navigate their way in online communities is an important piece of the learning.
• Open opportunities: Having your teaching practice and materials accessible to people beyond your students can have unexpected benefits. It can lead to invitations to give presentations and open up leadership opportunities related to teaching and learning.

Working with open resources builds literacies

• Finding, selecting and reviewing open resources in the process of learning helps students learn how to discern relevance, quality and perspective - important skills in the development of information literacies.
• Open resources allow for cost saving around course content (textbooks, course readings) and time saving for content creation (e.g videos, graphic material, etc.)
• Open resources provide the opportunity for students to be introduced to real world examples, data sets and images which may not otherwise be accessible in a classroom (e.g. open materials such as NASA Open Data-sets and images).
• Openly licensed resources (or those in the public domain) give you and your students options to reuse and remix materials in support of your learning and teaching goals. Engaging with OERs in this way builds digital literacies.
• Involving students directly in the creation of educational content encourages learners to “up their game” and stretch their skills to develop resources that will be immediately useful to their peers and beyond. By encouraging students to become "producers of knowledge" you can help motivate them and give them practice, writing, designing, working with authentic audiences.
• "Harnessing [open] publishing as a pedagogical tool improves student learning outcomes through high-impact learning practices: extensive writing, teamwork, service learning, undergraduate research, and experiential learning" (Alexander,L. & Peters,A (2016) in Publishing as Pedagogy: Connecting Library Services and Technology.

Contributions to the knowledge community builds relevancy

• Develop a wider community of practice: For some, the motivation to share their teaching materials openly comes from the value they attach to being in a community of educators who share and discuss practices and materials related to teaching and learning.
• Extend the value of your educational work: Creating open educational resources can be a way to extend the value of your educational work more widely
• Encourage students to make their work available for others to learn from and build on.
• Help students learn about the options for sharing their work through open licensing and how to use and attribute the work of others - whose work, data and research they build on.
• Provide opportunities for students to comment on the work of others - learning how to critique and provide feedback in a way that is respectful and contributes to furthering the work.

See more at Getting Started for Instructors

Creation and adaptation is educational practice

When we engage in the process of creating open educational resources, we are building important digital literacy skills that are increasingly important for scholarly work and collaboration. For example:

Locating resources to use in a mashup or build on to create a learning resource requires such skills as:

• knowledge about open licensing and copyright - enough to decide whether or not a work can be re-used or re-licensed when revised.
• practice working with different media formats (for downloading and taking apart).
• practice using familiar tools in new ways to support educational work (ie. social networking, photo sharing, DIY video production, media embeds).
• choosing hosting platforms for publication and distribution: (ie. weighing costs and benefits of choosing a platform to host video for example). This often requires a dig into privacy policies and terms of use for a variety of sites - adding to critical review skills for assessing digital platforms.

Publishing in a student-run, open journal engages many high impact educational practices, such as:

• peer editing and collaboration.
• intensive writing.
• opportunities to integrate and apply what they have learned for an authentic audience.
• participating in scholarly, professional practice.

Learning by teaching

Most of us understand that teaching something to others is an excellent way to better understand it oneself (or, on the other side, that one might think one understands something, but when attempting to teach it to others the gaps in understanding can become clear to oneself). The same can be the case for students: passively taking in information is vastly different from trying to put it together and explain it clearly to others. Asking students to create or adapt open educational resources is an excellent way for them to consolidate their understanding and benefit other students in the process.

Some examples of student work related to the development of such "tutorials":

• Physics 100 - Simon Bates : Learning Objects Assignment Assignment Description Creative Student Submissions
• Learning Commons - student team: 3 minute tutorials
• Digital Tattoo - student team: Think Before You Ink Series (TBYI)

Open resources

Not all open resources are created equal! If you want your resource to have the most flexibility for re-use, you will need to design it with that in mind (See: Creating Open Education Resources). This means conscious application of an open license and using formats (for video, etc.) that can easily be edited. Often, a first step to open is to make existing teaching resources freely available to students at the start of class. These are often pdf "textbooks" that are posted in the course website but are not yet licensed OERs (open educational resources), made findable by the public. It's important to know that open licensing and the use of open formats are important in meeting the 5R permissions characteristic of OERs that allow others to build on and improve them over time.

Types of open resources

Open access means free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment - SPARC .

Openly licensed materials are those which exist in the public domain or are licensed for sharing and re-use via Creative Commons. Licensing your work, allows you to retain your copyright while defining permissions to allow for re-use. See: Open Licensing for Instructors Open Licensing for Students

Publicly available resources are those which you have created and made available to your students via weblink or pdf. If these resources are not licensed, they offer the fewest options for re-use and contribution by a wider public audience. Sharing resources more broadly offers the possibility of someone adapting, and using your resources and (perhaps) adding to or building on your work.

Open assignments

One can also go a bit further into the realm of open teaching, beyond using open resources in courses. Many of these involve posting work publicly, but without an open license that allows others to revise and reuse it. Please see the licensing guide for instructors for more information on open licenses.

• One could post teaching materials such as syllabi and assignment instructions on a publicly viewable site, but without an open license.
• One could ask students to do course assignments on open platforms such as blogs (e.g. UBC Blogs) or wikis (e.g., UBC Wiki); these are publicly available but may not automatically have open licenses attached
• Students might post some of their coursework publicly, without an open license
• One could open up parts of a course to the public for discussion.
  • For example, one might allow comments on student blog posts that are open to anyone to contribute to (they can also be moderated to avoid spam and other unwanted comments).

See how to teach in the open section of this website for more information on how to incorporate these kinds of activities in a course.

Open practice

"Open practice" is a term that could actually cover any open teaching and learning activities, but we are using it here to designate teaching and learning activities that are further towards the "fully open" side of the spectrum. In this sense, open practice involves going beyond adopting a few open resources in one's courses or posting faculty or student work publicly.

Open practice may involve:

• Using all and only open resources in one's course, such as readings that are not only free to read, but also openly licensed to allow downloading, revision, annotating, etc.
• One's entire course site is public and openly licensed even if one doesn't post ALL aspects of a course publicly. Of course, things such as student marks should remain private, and one may also choose to not post exams so they can be reused later.
• Any student work or instructor teaching and learning resources that are posted to a public site are also given an open license.
• Openness extends to getting and incorporating feedback on the course and its open resources, whether instructor-produced or student-produced.
• Not only products are open (such as the course site, teaching and learning resources, student work), but also processes. For example, one shares the processes of designing a course, of how a video was created, of how well a particular open assignment worked, etc.
• One could open an entire course to participants from outside the institution (such as in a MOOC), still ensuring that the course elements are openly licensed.