A Framework for the Design of Open Pedagogy Assignments

“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.