Sarah Slade

Extreme makeover: Pedagogy edition – Robin de Rosa

We were asked to read Robin de Rosa’s account of how she applied principles of Open Pedagogy (or OpenPed) to a single undergraduate course over a term and follow a set of exercises based on her blog. Here’s what I came up with.

Incidentally, there’s a lovely quote from de Rosa re: the adoption of OpenPed

Open Pedagogy offers so many possibilities for K12 teachers and college-level instructors, and most faculty will not find it suitable to their courses to adopt all of the OpenPed approaches that this course drew from

Robin de Rosa – Extreme Makeover – Pedagogy edition – accessed June 2019

…and I would add, i.e. not for workplace learning. But hey…let’s see where we go with this.

DeRosa uses four basic guidelines for her course:

  1. Improves access to education, but this access is broadly writ.
    • Drives down textbook costs
    • ALSO raises issues re digital access, accessibility and universal design
  2. Treats education as a learner-driven process
    • How can students be empowered to move into the driver’s seat.
  3. Stresses community and collaboration over content.
  4. Connects the academy to the wider public

The TEL options she used were:

  • did not use Moodle
  • Students built own websites
  • Twitter
  • Hypothes_is
  • Own domains
  • Arranged for laptops to be borrowed from universities

DeRosa  follows a less prescriptive model of open pedagogy

  1. Broad definition of open access to education
  2. Learner-driven process
  3. Stresses community and collaboration over content
  4. Connects academy to a wider public

Her seminars could be seen to concentrate on three main areas of Hegarty’s model:

  • Learner-generated content
  • Participatory technology
  • Sharing ideas and resources

The approach led into other aspects of Hegarty’s model, mainly connected communities, people, openness and trust, etc.

With reference to Hendricks’ model, it covers:

  • low-cost access (all online resources, access to laptions via the laptop borrowing process)
  • Open-mindedness – changing the course objectives/attendance policy/grading practice to place students’ requirements at the centre of the course. This led to them changing the assignments

Applying deRosa’s techniques to OUH880

Whooo- time for FUN

I went for citizen science.

Open pedagogy adoption is relevant to the principles of learner-generated content and participatory learning. However, the problem arises with the direction of the learning and managing the student community so that you generate an atmosphere of trust. It would also be hard to introduce reflective practice for the entire group – to be honest you just get a collection of resources that the group contributes to and discusses. How would you (or the students) direct the learning?

I then looked at Adapting to Contexts, thinking about how it may benefit from Robin de Rosa’s approach:

  1. Personal inquiry section of Adapting to Contexts may benefit from Robin de Rosa’s  approach. It would have required a few online seminars /discussions, but it would have been niceto set up a ‘live’ personal inquiry. We would need to:
    • Define the nature of the inquiry
    • Run the inquiry
    • Collect and analyse data
    • Present our findings in a wiki or other method