I have watched Eric Werth and Katherine Williams from the University of Pikeville speak about the Open Pedagogy initiatives at their institution. Their session entitled “Evolution of Teaching Practice Through Experience with OER-Enabled Pedagogy” was a longer (~40 minutes, live) presentation at Open Ed 2021. Werth and Williams are involved in professional development at their campus and beyond. Werth defined OER-enabled pedagogy by four criteria that must be met, citing Wiley & Hilton 2018:
- Students create a new artifact
- The artifact supports learning of that beyond the creator
- Students may share their work publicly, and
- Students may openly license their artifacts.
I like this definition and agree with Werth about favorite this terminology. Williams talked about the similarity of OER-enabled pedagogy and other active learning techniques. The shift from active to OER-enabled pedagogy structure is highlighted by students driving content creation. I also appreciate the statement listed as a bullet point by Williams:
“[in OER-enabled pedagogy] material lives beyond the student-teacher dyad”
Katherine Williams, Open Ed 2021
Werth described the “Survival Guide to the University of Pikeville” project. The course had multiple sections with ~19 students per section with faculty and staff as facilitators. Participants earned two credits, and as part of the research, Werth and Williams interviewed faculty in 2019 and 2020 (11/12 and 11/11). They coded the transcripts for themes using the software Dedoose for analysis. Themes that emerged included instructors new to OER-enabled pedagogy struggled to see the value of the approach, instructors felt they were learning with students, confidence increased, and a major technical barrier was support to technology use. Werth mentioned that instructors encountered barriers understanding the pedagogical approach and its value for a first-year student population. Students encountered barriers in understanding licensing elements and navigating the environment with agency.
Werth and Williams concluded that “open pedagogy is most effective when the goals of the assignment allow student values to be expressed.” They recognized that existing assignments and projects could be enhanced by OER-enabled pedagogy. Williams suggested starting small and embedding OER-enabled pedagogy into new courses. Assignments they suggested included test bank question writing or “shifting an essay to an online resource/help guide for future students of the course/college.” Williams also mentioned how support networks are important, and in their case, they offer support to instructors. Werth spoke about overcoming resistance to change through practical suggestions such as starting small, taking training, creating and using resources, and thinking about multi-step implementation. To overcome the resistance that is more philosophical, they suggested gaining support from the administration to try something new and collect data. Werth mentioned their work was published in an open-access journal in 2021. This was a fun session, and the question and answer session included several suggestions. They mentioned having a Pressbooks guide and student attribution document to share information with students about copyright and sharing.
