Photo credit: Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
What was your favorite assignment in school? Was it one where you got to choose what you investigated or how you demonstrated your learning? When we give students choice in what they learn or how they demonstrate their learning, we promote engagement, metacognition, and autonomy. When we give students a voice in shaping course policies, practices, or units, we promote agency. For the first-time undergraduate, opportunities for “voice and choice” are opportunities for intellectual growth that leads to independence. For the adult learner, such opportunities recognize the maturity already attained and contextualize it within the discipline.
Plan for the Week
- Using the Open for All Workshop Course Review Rubric, go over your course, referring to the annotations related to the lens of student voice and choice. Identify opportunities to increase student agency with the DEIA educational practices in the annotations. Consider especially the starred annotations that rely on OER or Open Pedagogy. Please post in Module I Discussion by Thursday, March 21, in preparation for our meeting on Friday.
- Attend our live meeting Friday, March 22, 12 noon – 1:30 pm.
- Optionally:
- Return to the Module Discussion to reflect on your initial post or respond to colleagues by Monday.
- Explore the resources in this module to learn more about the theme for this week.
- Explore the OER & Open Pedagogy Resources area of our Blackboard site for more inspiration.
- Fill out the section of the Workshop Project template for this week’s theme.
Resources
- Give students choice, where appropriate – Eberly Center – Carnegie Mellon University – a quick, half-page with five ways to provide choice to students
- Co-Creating Rubrics with Students – a brief video from University of Colorado Boulder
OER and Open Pedagogy Student Voice and Choice Projects
- OER as Open Pedagogy: Student-Created Sustainable Agriculture Videos – Use Cornell’s Tomorrow’s Bounty series as inspiration for a student-choice, “renewable assignment” that lives beyond the scope of the class. The Open Pedagogy project turned into an OER project in 2018, when faculty guided students to openly license their work. (Read more about the assignment’s evolution in Ashley Shea’s “Building a Collection of Openly Licensed Student-Developed Videos.”)
- Why have students answer questions when they can write them? – Rajiv Jhangiani, who, in the course of his teaching career has co-author of three OER textbooks on psychology, provides insight and guidance on student-generated assessments
- Studio 395 – History podcasts from students at James Madison University illustrate the power of public-facing interviews on student-chosen topics
- A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students – Simple Book Publishing – Both philosophical and practical, filled with case studies, sample assignments, and more.
- Business Writing – As noted in the About This Book section, students provided feedback on this adaptation of an OER text to improve it.
