Many educators have the same problem with open educational resources. They have spent so much time using education materials published under restrictive licenses that they struggle to take advantage of the new pedagogical capabilities offered by OER. These pedagogical capabilities are all about the teaching and learning practices and tools that empower learners and teachers to create and share knowledge openly and learn deeply.
Three Definitions
The Open Education movement is still discussing and debating what it means to think about teaching and learning practices in a more inclusive, diverse, and open manner. You can read a few examples of how various educators approach this topic on the Year of Open (licensed CC BY 4.0, available at https://www.yearofopen.org/april-open-perspective-what-is-open-pedagogy/). At least three fundamental terms have emerged from this discussion:
- Open Educational Practices (from Cronin’s 2018 Open Edu Global presentation): the use, reuse, or creation of OER and collaborative, pedagogical practices employing social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, and the empowerment of learners.
- Open Pedagogy (from DeRosa and Jhangiani’s chapter in the 2017 book, A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students): an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education and a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable learners to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part. (There is more on this at Open Pedagogy Notebook, licensed CC BY 4.0 and available at http://openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy.)
- OER-Enabled Pedagogy (from Wiley and Hilton’s 2018 journal article “Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy”): a set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical when you have permission to engage in the 5R activities [i. e., retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute].
Personal Reflection: Why It Matters to You
When you’ve used open educational resources in the past, have you taken advantage of the permissions offered by their open licenses, or did you use OER just like you used your previous, traditionally copyrighted materials? In other words, did you do anything with the OER that was impossible to do with traditionally copyrighted materials? Why or why not?
