My experience of Open pedagogy and assessment is limited – even more so by this course.
It’s a little ironic that we’re discussing empowering students to take control of their learning, design courses and assessments around the students’ learning objectives rather than the institutions, and yet this is possibly the most prescriptive, controlled course I have ever studied. My academic background in the humanities is basically: “Here’s a book/poem/play. What do you think? I’ve got some thoughts. Do you agree with me? Do you disagree? Why? What does it mean to you? What other books/poems/plays do you think are a bit like this?”
So maybe what we’re doing is going back to an old-fashioned, Leavisite version of education (minus The Canon), giving it a fancy name and a bunch of theoretical baggage, and selling it to physics lecturers.
The very question is prescriptive – “make notes in your chosen portfolio tool…you could structure your notes following the characteristics of open pedagogy identified by Hendricks and/or Hegarty”. Then follows two more bullet points and the instruction to allocate 200 words to the task.
So here goes – word counts be damned, this is my blog.
As I said before, my experience of open pedagogy is very limited. I did The Online Educator as part of the first course in this module, but the pedagogical approach was very much what we’ve all become used to: read/watch/listen, then talk about it in the comments. I’m not sure how we could bring Open Ped into our workplace learning that easily.
We have done a bit of that with the social learning platform – people can share content and resources, but they never tag it properly and the content ends up floating around, never being viewed. What’s missing is the teaching/curating element, which is what we’re trying to bring in. In essence that means making things slightly less open – introducing a gatekeeper that assesses the contributions and decides whether or not it’s worth posting. We might be able to bring Open Ped into the training of interns and grads. We only have them for a short time, so it might be a good idea to create a community for them, set them tasks (create/remix learning resources for their area – write up a proposal for a mobile app – etc), then have the group review their learning. Anything really good can be ported or worked up into a permanent learning resource attached to them and posted in a permanent community. Then we could clear all the crap out of the community and make it ready for the next batch.
Hmmm…
Sarah Slade 