4.3 OEP approaches

OEP may best be recognised and understood through its praxis, i.e. pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies and social networks for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners. For example, Weller (2014, CC BY) provides this description of a course that exemplifies OEP:

…encourages learners to create daily artefacts, suggest assignments, establish their own space online and be part of a community that extends beyond the course both geographi­cally and temporally (…) learners create their own blogs, and these are used for all their solutions. The course then automatically aggregates all these contributions into one central blog. All of this is conducted in the open.

Openness, however, is not a binary construct. Open educational practices can be considered along a continuum, where the practices adopted at any particular time may be more or less open, depending on a range of factors. The use of OEP is always complex, personal, contextual, and continually negotiated (Cronin, 2017, CC BY).

As noted earlier, examples of of OEP might include co-creating open textbooks with students, using open assessment practices such as developing OER assignments, supporting students in editing Wikipedia, encouraging students to  publish their work openly, etc. If you wish to explore further approaches to OEP, following are a few excellent collections (of OEP examples and case studies), providing both practical ideas and inspiration:

• Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library and Student Collaborations (Clifton & Hoffman, 2020, CC BY)
• A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students (Mays, Ed., 2017, CC BY)
• My open textbook: Pedagogy and practice (DeRosa, 2016, CC BY)
• Open Pedagogy Notebook (DeRosa & Jhangiani, n.d., CC BY)
• Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective (Bali, et al, 2020, CC BY)
• JIME Special Issue on Open Education and Social Justice (Eds. Lambert & Czerniewicz, 2020, CC BY)