“Come for the cost savings, stay for the pedagogy,” is a popular sentiment in the open education community. The significant cost savings associated with the adoption of Open Educational Resources, OER (Hilton et al., 2014; Ikahihifo et al., 2017) creates accessible opportunities in education for students of all ages. Understanding the impact of OER as a practice is nascent and difficult to measure. Indeed, some argue that standard research methods are insufficient for explicating the benefits of free access to knowledge through OER (Grimaldi et al., 2019). If we cannot sufficiently understand what it means for students to access materials, we can only begin to imagine the shift to open pedagogy. This design is a student-centered teaching approach that empowers students as creators of knowledge and open resources (DeRosa & Robison, 2017), as well as promotes and potentially maximizes learning outcomes. As the integration of OER within classes compels instructors to reconsider the assigned course materials, open pedagogy recasts the role of course assignments and activities students engage in within a course. Yet, many are grappling with how to create and redesign assignments to engage students in open pedagogy. In this chapter, we make a case for applying open pedagogy in teacher education coursework and, utilizing a specific case, describe the Renewable Assignment Design Framework that may be adapted by librarians and faculty when planning for open educational practices.

At the Open Education Network, we value the power of open pedagogy to transform learning to be more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable. We have created this portal to support your efforts in open pedagogy. You can browse case studies/renewable assignments and student work product by discipline, search by keywords, or find teaching and learning resources to further your open pedagogy journey. We’re hoping to create a robust directory of open pedagogy resources, so please consider submitting your own case studies/renewable assignment, student work product, or teaching and learning resource.

This toolkit is organized around two core questions. The first, What is Open Pedagogy?, introduces students to the concept, its benefits, and examples they might encounter in class. The second, So You're the Creator, Now What?, addresses the more logistical side: student creator rights and responsibilities, and how to exercise them.

For instructors, the toolkit is designed as a scaffolding resource that can be assigned in full, in part, or adapted to fit the specific needs of a course. It is also available as a Google Doc and Manifold Project for flexible use across platforms.

Using OER effectively is more than just making an OER textbook available to students. There are many open resources available to faculty beyond traditional textbooks. Open pedagogy simply means that as teachers we engage with students to create information rather than having students be passive consumers of information.

Opening up learning spaces that reach beyond gated learning management systems and closed-door classrooms present the opportunity for authentic interactions and contributions to broader knowledge communities, but these systems may also contain threats. Take for example some of the current realities and tensions in open spaces: surveillance capitalism, digital redlining, algorithmic-decision-making, among others (Stewart, 2019). Many learners, and teachers, already occupy these spaces in their personal and civic lives and make choices about their presence, participation, and sharing practices constantly, both knowingly and unknowingly. Therefore, an additional area of concentration for our programming was to ask how we might cultivate critical approaches to digital communities, information landscapes, and the knowledge commons—including the technical, social, economic, and political forces that shape them. For us, this involved encouraging educators to explore the tensions of open environments alongside learners and to collaboratively ask what literacies might strengthen negotiations of those complexities. In other words, we stressed the importance of integrating information literacy into learning design so that it would provide opportunities for learners to cultivate critical decision-making about the information landscapes they inhabit.