Open Pedagogy Toolkit: Module 3

Benefits for Instructors

Reinventing Assessments

Renewable assignments allow you to move toward meaningful, student-centered assessments where students’ contributions to the specific assignment and the value of that assignment in the broader world is spotlighted. They promote creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration for instructors and students by encouraging you and your students to work together to accomplish a goal. Renewable assignments can also be used to align with institutional goals for pedagogical innovation and inclusion, benefiting the teaching and learning component of promotion and tenure. Renewable assignments can demonstrate the relevance of the course material to students’ lives, their success, the field, and/or the broader community.

Promoting Open Scholarship and Community Engagement

By integrating OER and OP, instructors contribute to a broader culture of sharing and collaboration in academia. This can enhance professional development and foster interdisciplinary connections. Instructors can align their research with their teaching, enabling students to work with the instructor to produce scholarship that is valuable to their field of research (Veletsianos, 2017).

By encouraging students to work with the community, you can build valuable community connections. The community may include people in your department, university, town, field of research, and the OP community. There are a lot of different communities that can benefit from renewable assignments, and you can strengthen your connections by sharing your students’ work with them.  For example, if you share your students’ work with colleagues, this provides an opportunity for you to connect with them about the work they’re doing.