Topic 4 Blog Post

In this week’s reading, I am most interested in the idea of renewable assignments. I also start to think about what these entail in the context of my own learning. I have a friend who studies film at Ryerson. She says to me that sometimes the instructors would ask her to create a video on a topic. Instead of only adhering to the rubrics of the assignment and complete the task haphazardly, she would always put these projects in the bigger context of her career for longevity and expandability. For example, she would make sure that all her projects show a trajectory of progress and growth while ensuring that they all come together to form a cohesive portfolio. She would public these videos on open platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube so that other people may also refer to them. I feel that what she has attempted to do is to create a somewhat renewable assignment. The only thing that is lacking is whether her works are openly licensed. It would be difficult for that to happen because of the concept of authorship pertaining to filmmaking. However, I believe that by simply revising the assignment a little bit to allow her to reflect on her learning and methodology, instead of only looking at the resulting project, her assignments can contribute to the larger field of OER as an openly licensed artifact.

Wiley and Hilton (2018) state that there are 5Rs to OER, retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. My friend’s works, other than being shown as great examples from past years by instructors who are willing to show past-year examples, never have a chance of redistribution. There was also no remix, where she could create a video explaining her process in the context of best practices delineated in textbooks or lectures. I feel that this is an example of wasting millions of hours. Imagine other students who have also created videos themselves without keeping in mind the connectivity among the videos. They would not even be able to reuse these contents for their own job search as part of their portfolios. I think by engaging students in the creation of OERs, there is a possibility for the learning materials to grown exponentially, significantly benefiting future students in the same field.

Other than my EDCI classes, I have never engaged in any class that has this OER-enabled approach to pedagogy. My essays are peer-reviewed, but most students only pat me on my back for my hard work. My paintings and drawings were shared with the class but not beyond the classroom. We still have a long way to go in terms of OER-enabled learning.

My pod mate Alex also shares my sentiment about having something to show in an employment environment. However, he also brings up the point that it may be unethical for students to contribute to the teaching materials. He proposed that it would be nice to do for extra credit. I feel that this problem could be mitigated if the course is designed more to reflect on learning rather than to simply produce the results of a learning process. For example, instead of asking students to simply write a script, the assignment could be designed to ask students to reflect on how they write a script and the devices they have employed in the process. It is the redistribution of the documentation of the process, which does not really have copyright issues, rather than openly licensing someone’s artistic creation.

Valerie states that she would most likely delete assignments after receiving a score. I think there may also be concerns about plagiarism. Students are not allowed to even reuse assignments they have created for one course on another course, even though sometimes the assignments have similar criteria. I think for the 5Rs to happen, we may need to alter our view on the concept of self-plagiarism. I agree that it would not make sense to reuse the entire assignment. However, it would make sense to recycle part of the assignment and create an extension. Courses should be designed so that we can take previous assignments and make revisions. For example, if in a class I was asked to write a script, I may be able to film that script in a different class. I may be able to do sound-editing for that film in a post-production class. This way, there is a logical continuity to my learning. It also makes it possible for me to spend more time documenting my progress, rather than having to reinvent the wheel every single time I am given a new assignment.

References

Wiley, D. & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-enabled Pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 19(4).