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OER & Affordable Learning Materials (ALM)

What is Open Pedagogy?

"What is Open Pedagogy?" (from iterating toward openness)

According to David Wiley (2013), considered by many to be a founder of the OER concept, open pedagogy involves addressing a fundamental two-part question:

OER are:

Free to access
​Free to reuse
Free to revise
Free to remix
Free to redistribute

"The question becomes, then,

  • What is the relationship between these additional capabilities and what we know about effective teaching and learning?
  • How can we extend, revise, and remix our pedagogy based on these additional capabilities?" (para. 2)

Another Definition

UT Arlington Libraries (2018) defines open pedagogy as 

the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. It's a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate understanding through the act of creation. The products of open pedagogy are student created and openly licensed so that they may live outside of the classroom in a way that has an impact on the greater community. (para. 1)

Open Pedagogy Notebook

Open Pedagogy Notebook: Sharing Practices, Building Community

The Interconnectedness of OERs and Open Pedagogy

Consider an excerpt from Jhangiani & DeRosa (2017) from the Open Pedagogy chapter of the OER text A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students

So one key component of Open Pedagogy might be that it sees access, broadly writ, as fundamental to learning and to teaching, and agency as an important way of broadening that access. OERs are licensed with open licenses, which reflects not just a commitment to access in terms of the cost of knowledge, but also access in terms of the creation of knowledge. Embedded in the social justice commitment to making college affordable for all students is a related belief that knowledge should not be an elite domain. Knowledge consumption and knowledge creation are not separate but parallel processes, as knowledge is co-constructed, contextualized, cumulative, iterative, and recursive. (para. 13)