Including Open Educational Practices in Your Courses

Teaching & Learning Guide

Welcome to the Teaching & Learning Guide for Including Open Educational Practices in Your Courses! 

This guide includes information, tips, and resources designed to help you: 

Defining OEP

Open Educational Practices (OEP) are often defined as a learner-driven approach to teaching. This means that students have agency in their learning. In short, OEP is a set of pedagogical practices that include engaging students in content creation, encouraging them to contribute to knowledge building outside the classroom, and offering more student choice. In this guide, we’ll explore some of the main tenets of OEP and examples of how to incorporate open practices into your classroom. 


In this guide, we’ll broadly define OEP, define some major themes of OEP, and suggest specific ways to incorporate Open Educational Practices into your courses.

How is OEP Related to OER?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching materials such as textbooks, research guides, and study questions that are intentionally created and licensed to be openly shared and modified at no cost to the user. This means students do not have to purchase OER course materials. OER are often instructor-created and shared in databases such as OpenStax where other instructors can adopt all or parts of the OER and in most cases, remix it to suit their particular needs (Hodgkinson-Williams). For more information about using OER in your courses, contact the TWU library. 

Many instructors who have begun using OER in their courses have changed their pedagogical practices by extension. In the simplest sense, choosing to use an OER, whether as-is or remixed, is an Open Educational Practice. But, for the purposes of this guide, we’ll explore OEP that are based in pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. In other words, this guide will focus on OEP that are rooted in student agency, collaboration, and student empowerment. These types of OEP are intentionally used to increase equity and inclusion and shift the power imbalance between learner and instructor in order to reduce systemic inequality (Lambert). Research suggests that incorporating OEP can lead to increased critical thinking, greater self-direction, and increased enjoyment of learning for students (Werth).

OEP and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

OEP is often understood as a social justice practice. One reason is because using OER, an open educational practice, increases access for students by reducing the cost of taking courses. One main goal of using OER is that it places students at an equal starting point - there are no cost barriers to accessing course content from day one of the semester. As some scholars have pointed out, OER may still create barriers related to internet access, digital literacy, and language (Hodgkinson-Williams). OEP can serve as a bridge between adopting open resources and making sure students can use them in a way that is equitable and inclusive. Beyond using OER, OEP can help remedy power imbalances that exist within the classroom - both between students and instructors and students and each other. There are additional benefits to diversity, equity, and inclusion when incorporating OEP. 


By asking students to collaborate on course content, instructors can make content relevant to students. This means that traditional materials and activities that may not consider the diverse cultural backgrounds of the students can be replaced with content that engages students. Students are more likely to suggest assignments and content that they themselves find useful, engaging, and relevant to their own experiences. Instructors can get to know their students better through collaborative processes. Getting to know students’ backgrounds means instructors can bring examples that are more culturally responsive and thus relevant to each unique group of students they teach (Adam).


Instructors may also find that using OEP can help them be more inclusive for students with various disabilities. Universal Design is a theory and a practice meant to improve access for all students. OEP can help instructors use Universal Design practices, and, maybe more importantly, understand the need for Universal Design practices. Student choice is especially relevant for increasing inclusion for students with disabilities. Disability is another aspect of student diversity, so allowing students to choose how or when they complete work can help enhance inclusivity.

Student Agency and Collaboration

Formal education is often characterized as a triangular relationship made up of interactions between teachers and learners and between fellow learners. These interactions are supported by educational content and resources such as textbooks, digital content, course notes and presentations, study guides, quiz questions, and assignments. It is usually teachers that select and/or develop this educational content. OEP asks teachers to rethink this relationship (Lane). 


Student agency and collaboration are at the heart of OEP. By allowing students to voice insight and make decisions about learning materials and classroom practices, an instructor is recognizing that knowledge construction is not a closed practice (Werth). Research has found that when students have a say in course decisions such as due dates or assignment format, they are more likely to have a stake in their own learning. In order to invite students to have agency in the course, instructors can enlist students to collaborate on course decisions that affect all students in the course. Student agency may also include allowing students individual choice in the course, such as assignment formats, due dates, or tracks of study. 


Collaborative practices most often refer to students participating in creating assignments and policies for the course. Including collaborative practices in your course does not mean students have full say in every aspect of the course. A collaboration means the instructor is involved in making decisions, as well. In fact, all of these practices are led and mediated by the instructor, who may choose to include collaborative practices only in some aspects of the course. 

Examples of Collaborative Practices: 

Renewable Assignments

A key element of OEP is the creation and use of non-disposable or renewable assignments. Renewable assignments have a larger audience, impact, and legacy (Jhangiani). The goal of a renewable assignment is to ask students to create an artifact that has value to others. This type of OEP invites learners to be co-creators of information rather than passive recipients (Werth). 


Renewable assignments often include sharing work with a larger community, but this more broad sharing can be left as a choice for students. Students may have a variety of legitimate reasons for not wanting to share their work publicly. You can let students know about their choice to share their work using a statement such as the following: 


You may have a variety of legitimate reasons for not wanting to share your work openly. You have choices about how you wish to share your project. You may wish to share your work under a pseudonym. You may also choose to complete a different project instead of this project. If you choose to opt out of publicly sharing your work, it will not impact your grade for this course.

Students may need to openly license assignment products in order to allow them to be shared and used by a broader audience.

Examples of Renewable Assignments:  


The Open Pedagogy Notebook includes more ideas and examples of renewable assignments. Many of the examples include details and rubrics.

Designing for OEP

According to Werth, an open educator often practices openness in four ways: Design, Content, Teaching, and Assessment. One goal of open design is to invite students to participate in the design of learning activities, which helps instructors communicate clearly the purpose behind those activities. Since a bulk of course design often happens before students enter the course, designing for OEP takes a bit more thought and practice. 

Before the course begins

In order to plan to incorporate OEP into your course, it is a good idea to begin by specifying which parts of the course you will ask students to help design and which parts are set before you meet your students. For example, you may decide to set up all major assignments before the semester begins, but seek student participation creating the rubrics. Or you may decide to have a certain number of major assignments to assess, but the timeline and topics will be decided with student feedback. Choose a level of student participation that you are comfortable with. Keep in mind some set structure is important both logistically and to set expectations.

Consider course objectives

As you consider adding OEP, be sure to keep in mind that you must meet course-level objectives. It might be helpful to ask how you can make sure objectives are met by students while adding elements of agency, choice, and renewability to your course. This will require a balanced approach to OEP. If you have the ability to write or change your objectives, you might even include students making decisions about the course in your objectives.

During the course

Let students know at the beginning of the semester that some aspects of the course will be decided on after seeking their feedback. Be as clear as possible in the syllabus about which course elements are set and which elements are open for feedback. Let students know when course collaboration sessions will take place. For example, you may choose to co-write the rubrics for all major assignments at the beginning of the semester, or you may choose to write each rubric before each assignment. 

Assessing OEP

Since collaboration is an important aspect of OEP, collaborative assessment makes sense as part of an OEP-enabled course. Some examples of collaborative assessment include: 

Badges and micro-credentialing:  

Asking students to complete assessments that require credentialing through an established organization can help them feel that the competency-based skills learned in the course are practical for their chosen professions. Through micro-credentialing, students enter a collaborative relationship with the field more broadly. Micro-credentialing also emphasizes that the work students do in the course is not solely for the judgment of the instructor.  

Peer reviews:  

Including peer reviews can help build community in your course and encourage students to learn from each other. Peer reviews can be challenging when instructions for peer feedback are open-ended. Many instructors report that students do not give each other substantial feedback. One way to increase the effectiveness of peer reviews is to provide detailed questions for students to answer. This guide has additional tips for using peer reviews. You can learn how to use the Canvas peer review function from this Canvas Guides article. 

Conference grading:

Conference grading is when an instructor meets with students one-on-one to discuss what grade a student will receive on an assignment. An article from the website Composing Possibilities suggests explaining the method and rationale for conference grading to students if you decide to use this practice. It is also helpful to emphasize that a grading conference is a space for collaboration, not an inquisition. 

Working with your Instructional Design Partner

Incorporating Open Educational Practices into your course is a great way to introduce student agency to your course and increase student engagement. OEP is not an all-or-nothing perspective - there are small and large ways to include Open Practices into your classroom. Contact your Instructional Design Partner for help incorporating OEP into your courses 

Additional Resources

The following resources are Openly Licensed: 

References