This week’s reading helped to round out my understanding of OER’s and their current state/functionality in an educational setting. The reading touched on the concepts of renewable and disposable assignments which really stood out to me. It got me to thinking on my past educational experiences and led me to evaluate certain classes I took which had an abundance of ‘disposable assignments’ and I was only able to recall information for those classes I had interest/was engaged in. All the other classes I need time to remember the materials covered as I was just completing assignments to essentially cross them off a list and wasn’t really exploring the topic at hand. I feel that this was a direct result of assignment instructions that stifled your creativity by setting out strict guidelines and parameters for the grading criteria (more apparent in STEM courses). However, at the same time you do need that minimum ‘benchmark’ to be made apparent for what is to be expected for an assignment because otherwise a student might miss out on the intended result of that lesson if they end up going off on a tangent in their assignment. A question I would ask on this would be, in what university faculties would ‘renewable’ assignments (OER-enabled pedagogy) be a more feasible/improved upon practice in overall course work?
The four-part test mentioned in the article is what allows us to determine if an assignment/learning practice can be considered a renewable assignment. I believe that a good example of this from my own educational experience would be the blog posts we create in this course. We as students are able to create new ‘artifacts’ in the form of blog posts and are also given the opportunity to revise an existing blog post for our digital portfolio assignment. The created blog posts also have value beyond supporting my own learning as it promotes discussion among my classmates, which in turn supports their learning as well. We are all also given the option to publicly share our WordPress blogs so that they appear in search engine results, etc. and are given the option to openly license our specific blog sites.
The proposed research question I choose to answer from the article goes to ask: “Do students assigned to create, revise, or remix artifacts find these assignments more valuable, interesting, motivating, or rewarding than other forms of assessment?”. In my opinion this style of assessment is more rewarding/beneficial as it promotes creativity and allows for students to fully express their thoughts on a topic in a more unfiltered manner. This leads to higher levels of engagement as there is more pride being taken in the work as it is a direct reflection of your current understanding of the subject.
Reference:
Wiley, D. & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-enabled Pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 19(4).
Hey Gurbir,
I agree with your comment on disposable assignment. A strict guideline is easier for students to follow the course, but they hardly think deeply about what is the meaning of their action.
For your question about the renewable assignment, I think the feasibility is not depend on faculty, but on the content of course. For the subjects like Physics, there is always a right answer to the question, thus students can hardly come up with a new idea by discussion.
Hello Gurbir,
I concur with your thoughts on disposable/renewable assignments. I think looking back on the majority of my assignments they have been quite disposable. Though, given how traditional and closed my learning experiences have been, I suppose that’s not too surprising. In consideration of the feasibility of more renewable assignments, I think there needs to first be a little education cultural shift in both curricula developers, instructors, and students view of what open learning can be before implementing this new style of assignments. While it may be difficult to picture developing OER-enabled for some of my past experiences, I think if I was more familiar with OER, open learning, and renewable assignments just before my post-secondary experience, having a course with some “renewable” assignments quite feasible.
Allen