Open Educational Resources

While educators often initially embrace open educational content as a way to maximize access to curricular materials and significantly reduce their costs, many instructors leverage OER to reconceptualize and improve pedagogy and advance authentic, participatory, engaged learning. One definition describes such open educational practices (OEP) as the “use/reuse/creation of OER and collaborative, pedagogical practices employing social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, and empowerment of learners.”

Open educational practices are seen as a means for students and faculty to develop new approaches to co-creating knowledge, assessing student outcomes, and designing programs. In these and other ways, OEP align with the principles of open scholarship.

The unaffordability of education—whether in terms of tuition or textbooks—has undoubtedly made the ‘free’ element of Open a rallying cry. However, as the open education movement matures, the fulcrum of this discussion appears to be shifting from an emphasis on the adoption of open educational resources to an embrace of open educational practices. In this chapter, authors Robin DeRosa and Scott Robison draw on a variety of examples to illustrate the empowering potential of open pedagogy, an approach in which students are not just consumers of content but active and visible participants in the construction of knowledge. The chapter concludes with a reflection on some of the challenges and lessons learned from engaging students in public scholarship.