4.2 Getting Started with Open Educational Practices
If you’re new to open educational practices, it’s a great idea to start slow. Your students are likely new to this kind of work as well. Helping students to imagine potential audiences that would benefit from their work takes discernment and patience.
Students can be uncomfortable when offered opportunities to create and share their knowledge. Open educational practices invite people to step into a different relationship to themselves, to you as their instructor, and to higher education itself. Allowing alternative options for students who aren’t ready to share their work publicly honors individual autonomy. Inviting students to share their work with one another can help students to see the value of open educational practices, as sharing with peers helps people to integrate the perspectives of others into their own understanding of its meaning.
Open educational practices are rooted in respect for student agency and authority. This means that informed consent for open licensing is the foundation for any open pedagogy project. Open Licenses for Students includes helpful slide decks orienting students to copyright and open licenses. These files can be linked in your course site and syllabus.
To start a conversation with students about informed consent for open licensing, you might use one of the following strategies:
- Create a discussion board for students with the following questions and ask them to comment on one other person’s posts:
- What is your experience with open licenses? For example, have any of your courses assigned openly licensed textbooks before? Hint: we’re using one in this class!
- How would you explain what an open license is to a friend or family member? Review the short video What is Creative Commons [YouTube] and then define it in your own words.
- Why might a student want to attach an open license to their course work? Why might a student decide not to share their work with an open license?
- Search for a topic on YouTube and filter for Creative Commons (Watch How To Find & Use Creative Commons Videos On YouTube Without Copyright Claims ✅ [YouTube] for help with this process). Can you find an example of openly licensed student-created work?
- Share open pedagogy projects that Oregon students have developed, for example, Elizabeth Pearce’s Contemporary Families textbook. Ask students to review each project and answer the following questions:
- What do you know about the students who created this work? Did they choose to include biographical information or not?
- Who is the intended audience for this work? How do you know?
- What permissions come with this work? Review About CC Licenses to understand what future users can and can’t do.
- Create an openly licensed one-page guide to a student-selected topic (ex: pets, sports, food, travel, campus survival guide) either in small groups or as a class over two class sessions. Shared online documents or slide decks can help students collaborate. In the first session, model for students how to search for images with Unsplash, Noun Project, and repositories recommended by Open Oregon Educational Resources. Show students how to do a fair use evaluation using a checklist (OSU’s Fair Use Worksheet is helpful!) and provide attribution to all rights reserved images used under fair use (Ex: [Title] © [Name of author] is used under fair use). In the second class session, give students work time together on the guide, and then model how to write open licenses statements together. Ask which students would like to receive attribution, or if they’d prefer attribution as a group, and which open license they want to attach. Uploading each guide to a page in your learning management system will allow students to revisit the work they did together.
You can review open pedagogy assignments created by other Oregon instructors to help you scaffold your own assignment:
- Michelle Huss created Open Pedagogy Human Genetics Pre-Allied Health, which includes sample assignments and resource links.
Tools for documenting student informed consent for open licensing:
- Student Agreement to Publish Course Work under a Creative Commons License from Kwantlen Polytechnic University invites students to initial their preferred open license from a list. This form is great if you are collecting student work to post yourself as a playlist on YouTube or in your institutional repository.
- Google forms are a great way for students to indicate consent as well as their preferred permissions for sharing. Student Consent: Sharing with Class Resource can be modified to suit your class.
- Student Release of Course Materials for Public Availability allows students to document permission for an institution or instructor to reproduce and distribute work on a royalty-free basis for educational purposes and public communication.
Licenses and Attributions
All content on this page is by Veronica Vold for Open Oregon Educational Resources and is licensed under CC BY 4.0.