As noted in the introductory section on OEP, just as education cannot be reduced to learning materials alone, so open education is not focused on open educational resources alone. OEP (open educational practices) is a broad descriptor that includes the use of OER, but also open pedagogy and open sharing of teaching practices — all with the goal of improving access, enhancing learning, and empowering learners.
There are many forms of OEP that educators may use to open their curricula and their teaching. Following are just a few examples:
- Open connected courses enable students to connect with students and educators in other courses, institutions and countries, as well as interested learners who may not be enrolled in formal education (e.g. DS106, Equity Unbound, NetNarr)
- Open discussions in any course can be enabled through the use of course hashtags and/or open tools (e.g. via blogs, Twitter)
- Collaborative web annotation facilitates the open annotation of any web-based source text, thus engaging learners in co-construction and critique of knowledge (e.g. Marginal Syllabus and #AnnotatedSyllabus, Kalir, 2020)
- Co-creating open textbooks with students marks a move from teachers sourcing/using open textbooks to engaging students in this work, empowering all in co-creating knowledge (e.g. Digital Open Textbooks for Development and Student Created Open “Textbooks” as Course Communities, DeRosa, 2018, CC BY)
- Creating OER assignments is the process of designing assessments that ask students to produce OER that will be of interest and relevance to an audience beyond the bounds of the course/module (e.g. Digital Futures for Learning: An OER Assignment, Ross, 2019, CC BY)
- Student-created OER, as a form of OEP, supports students in creating open resources as part of the learning process, enabling students to engage with and share their learning with others (e.g. #UWinToolParade: Open Pedagogy as OER, Stewart, 2019, CC BY-NC and And Still We Rise, Beatty, et al, 2020, CC BY)
- Wikipedia editing is a specific type of student-created OER where students are supported in engaging with Wikipedia as editors (becoming Wikipedia producers rather than consumers), thereby co-creating scholarly content for the open web (e.g. Wikipedia in the Classroom, McAndrew, 2017 and Teaching Wikipedia, Koziura, et al, 2020, CC BY)
The examples of OEP shared here span multiple disciplines, institutions and countries, but all have been used in higher education settings. You may find it useful to explore some of the many examples above, the collections of OEP listed in OEP approaches, or the full set of References and Resources for this section to delve deeper into the concepts of OEP and open pedagogy.
The next section invites you to consider how you might use OEP in your own teaching and learning.