Engaging Students as Designers With Renewable Assessment: Creating a Legacy of Open Educational Resources

• In Event: Open Education: Empirical Evidence on Innovations Across Disciplines

Abstract

Background
Renewable assessments (RA) offer students the ability to demonstrate newly acquired knowledge and skills in a format that has extended purpose beyond the class (Wiley & Hilton, 2018). RA give students a sense of agency (Baran & AlZoubi, 2020) and perhaps also helping professionals in authentic contexts (Authors, in press). When students create open educational resources (OER) as a renewable assessment, ideally they develop not only a sense of agency, but also knowledge and skills related to OER use. In turn, these students should be better able to use OER in the workforce, and avoid struggles suffered by other educators who may not fully understand the concepts behind OER and related intellectual property issues (Ozdemir & Bonk, 2017; Serena & Nathaniel, 2018).

Purpose

This study uses the networked knowledge activities (NKA) framework (Author, 2020) and five R’s of open framework (Wiley, n.d.) to evaluate how graduate students created and distributed OER for a class assignment. The intent of this RA project was to help students become savvy creators/users of OER. A byproduct was the development of products that served others, including legacy artifacts (Schwartz et al., 1999) for future classes.

The research questions guiding this study are:

How do students apply NKAs and the five R’s of OER when working on RAs?
How did students perceive the impact of creating RAs on their learning process and outcomes?
What are the known outcomes, including legacies, of the RAs created during the course?

Method

This multiple case study examines the course experiences and outcomes of students, teaching assistants, and instructors in three interrelated classes:
Class 1 (2020): designed and taught by Author1 with Author2 (teaching assistant).
Class 2 (2022): taught by Author 3, building on legacy of Class 1.
Class 3 (2022): taught by Author 2 at a second institution.
Each class required students to create OER as a form of RA. Collectively these three classes show the progression of open pedagogy and RA projects across courses and highlight strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Data collection included surveys, interviews, and course artifacts (e.g., course activities and RA). Data analysis includes descriptive statistics for closed survey items and interviews and artifacts coded for evidence of networked knowledge and the 5 R’s of OER.

Findings
Across the three cases, students were most comfortable collecting and curating existing OER or creating their own, and least certain about revising and remixing others’ creations for redistribution. Initial trepidation about protecting their own intellectual property rights quickly subsided, but concerns about respecting others’ rights grew. The OER creation process was rewarding, and students embraced the notion of leaving legacies for future classes. Whereas initially students were focused on concrete products, over time their interests shifted to serving others and the evolution of OER across users. Outcomes extended beyond those required by the course.

Significance
This study has implications for how future instructors might design RAs and use the NKA and 5Rs frameworks to support the process. Guidelines for development, sharing, and legacy generation will be shared.

Author

• Vanessa Paz Dennen, Florida State University
  Presenting Author