Acquiring Essential Knowledge
It’s well-established that people learn through activities. And it’s equally well-established that copyright restricts people from engaging in a range of activities. When juxtaposed like this, it becomes clear that copyright restricts pedagogy by contracting the universe of things that learners and teachers can do with education materials. If there are things that learners are not allowed to do, this means there are ways that learners are not allowed to learn. If there are things that teachers aren’t allowed to do, this means there are ways that teachers aren’t allowed to teach.
You can learn about how these restrictions on what teachers and learners can do impacts teaching and learning by reading the metaphor/blog post about driving airplanes on roads at https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3761.
Examples of Open Educational Practices, Open Pedagogy, and OER-Enabled Pedagogy
One of the foundational ideas of open teaching and learning practices is the distinction between disposable and renewable assignments.
Do you remember doing homework for school that felt utterly pointless? A “disposable assignment” is an assignment that supports an individual student’s learning but adds no other value to the world—the student spends hours working on it, the teacher spends time grading it, and the student gets it back and then throws it away. While disposable assignments may promote learning by an individual student, these assignments can be demoralizing for people who want to feel like their work matters beyond the immediate moment.
In contrast, “renewable assignments” are assignments that both support individual student learning and add value to the broader world. With renewable assignments, learners are asked to create and openly license valuable artifacts that, in addition to supporting their own learning, will be useful to other learners both inside and outside the classroom. Classic renewable assignments include, for example, collaborating with learners to write new case studies for textbooks, creating “explainer” videos, and modifying learning materials that will speak more directly to learners’ local cultures and needs.
To explore additional examples of this pedagogical approach in action, check out the examples given by David Wiley in Project Management for Instructional Designers (licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, available at http://pm4id.org/) and Robin DeRosa’s Actualham website (http://robinderosa.net/uncategorized/my-open-textbook-pedagogy-and-practice/) of learners adapting existing mate-
