Adventures in Open Pedagogy
With the onset of the pandemic, students not only experienced a rapid shift to online learning, but also a change in their sense of community. With support from the University of Mississippi’s Academic Innovation Group and a Course Enhancement Grant from the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, I revamped my hybrid online first-year writing courses by embedding video discussions from Flipgrid within Blackboard. In doing so these modifications not only helped students make the shift from in-person to online learning but also allowed them to engage in co-creating open pedagogy video assignments that fostered a sense of community within the course and beyond. I’ve been using Open Pedagogy with my first-year writing students for the past four years, and have presented on the challenges and immense rewards associated with it at the ADIEL and ASCUE conferences with my presentation Where Students Teach: Unlocking Open Pedagogy in the Digital Composition Classroom.
Design Structure
Students were able to redefine their sense of community and learning by using open pedagogy to collaborate and cocreate assignments on Blackboard using Flipgrid for the benefit of future students in the class. Since open pedagogy relies on the principle of shared learning, these videos were published under a CC-BY-SA license so that they could be used and remixed by anyone in their learning community. After the end of each module in Blackboard, I invited students to leave a video to a future student in the course offering advice about an assignment or strategy that was helpful to their learning. Once students completed their videos, I then curated them and embedded them into each weekly folder within Blackboard for the benefit of future students. Thus, each time a new weekly folder was opened, current students were able to view a number of short videos from previous writing students about what to expect from that week’s assignments and tips about how to be successful and at the end of the week were invited to continue the collaboration by leaving their own video to a future student in the course.
Additionally, students were able to work in groups to create longer, in-depth tutorials evaluating many of the assignments and software being used in our Blackboard course. These tutorials used student-created videos and an interactive presentation to create a showcase for the benefit of future students. Students not only evaluated software and assignments within the course but were also able to create tutorials about campus resources, like the writing center. Furthermore, students also used their own work in the class as artifacts to demonstrate how they applied the writing process to their own work.
Why it Matters
Implementing open pedagogy video assignments into first-year writing courses allowed for students to learn in innovative and collaborative ways during the pandemic and shows great promise to expand a student’s learning community. Since these assignments are created with openness in mind, they can be shared and reused as a resource at no cost by any institution to benefit their students and further enlarge a student’s learning community. Likewise, since Flipgrid is a free resource, it can easily be scaled within Blackboard’s LMS to serve the needs of an individual faculty member’s course or entire institution.
