Attendees will see how to apply engaging open practices to improve learning and accelerate OER development. They will explore a model of student-driven interdisciplinary content learning through teaching and development of educational materials.
Tapping into the talent pool of undergraduate language students, we adopted Open Educational Practices (OEP) incorporating reusable or meaningful open assignments (Wiley, 2013) as the core curriculum for a language course. The reusable assignments allow students to perfect the living text through various collaborative editorial and pedagogical practices (Paoletti, 1995) focusing on vocabulary, grammar, and structure. In addition, the students create, edit and design ancillary learning materials under Creative Commons licenses with the objective of producing a meaningful stand-alone open educational resource for future iterations while exploring socially relevant topics. The course activities enhanced scholarship and empowered the learner to leverage collaborative digital technologies, perfect language skills by teaching their peers, and have their course-work impact the world in a socially meaningful way by contributing to the open movement. This work embodying collaborative learning practices (Dillenbourg, 1999), in stark contrast to the competitive nature of our current educational system, offers the opportunity to extend open content creation to a much larger community while at the same time promoting a practice that allows the learner to participate actively in and contribute to the subject matter that they are studying. Participants will be encouraged to engage via suggestions and open discussion throughout the presentation. A couple online polls will be used to capture participant opinions at various stages, and small group discussions will be used towards the end to share insights and ideas. Lastly, since this open resource is under continual development, an open invitation to future collaboration will be proposed to interested participants.
