- Use social learning, including blogs, chat, discussion forums, wikis, and group assignments.
- Leverage massive participation – have all students contribute something that adds to or improves the course overall.
Examples of open pedagogy would include Jim Groom’s DS106, an open course which 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. Dave Cormier starts his educational technology course every year by asking students to create a contract stating ‘that each of you decide how much work you would like to do for what grade. Individual assignments are given a “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” assessment upon completion’ (Cormier 2013). Courses such as Octel (http://octel.alt.ac.uk) have learners create their own blogs, and this is used for all their solutions. The course then automatically aggregates all of these contributions into one central blog. All of this is conducted in the open.
This is not to suggest that any of these examples should be the default or adopted by others. They are suited to particular contexts and topics. The point is a more general one, in that openness is a philosophical cornerstone in these courses. It is present in the technology adopted, in the resources referenced, in the activities students undertake and in the teaching approaches taken. All of this is made possible by openness in several other areas: resources need to be made openly available, technology needs to be free to use, students need to be prepared to work in the open and universities need to accept these new models of operating. I would suggest that we are only just at the beginning of exploring models of teaching and learning that have this open mindset. It is
