Exploring Student Perceptions as Co-authors of Course Material

Abstract

Students acting as co-creators of academic material is growing in popularity as a pedagogical approach in higher education. With student engagement and persistence consistently being emphasized for student and institution well-being, educational praxis must foster engaged, high-retention student cohorts. This exploratory research uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the experience of students participating in a first-year course utilizing OER-enabled Pedagogy. Students considered how projects that were open impacted their perception of course engagement, satisfaction, and overall experience. Participants also evaluated their level of concern in sharing attributed academic work. A plurality of students preferred the project using OERenabled Pedagogy, indicating it increased engagement and skills acquisition. The majority of students were unconcerned about sharing work publicly, even if their names were included. Themes that emerged from interviews included the motivational value of creating work potentially valuable to others, being given agency, and receiving public credit for their efforts.

“The pictures allowed me to connect to the material more”: Student perceptions of a diversity-focused open pedagogy assignment.

“…Students also indicated agreement that their photographs contributed to the diversity of publicly available materials. Consistent with previous studies (Baran & Al Zoubi, 2020;Hilton et al, 2019;Hollister, 2020;Werth & Williams, 2021), students reported a moderate level of concern about their project being publicly available, in general (M = 3.0, SD = 1.37, range 1-5). However, they also had a fair level of agreement that they liked sharing their photos with their classmates (M = 3.94, SD = 1.24, range 1-5) and the public (M = 3.94, SD = 1.26, range 1-5).…”

“…The majority of the questions were on 5-point Likert scales with three open-ended questions included as well. There were 11 Likert-scale questions on instructional material motivation (based on Loorbach et al, 2015), 10 Likert-scale questions on student perceptions of self (based on S. C. Hutton, 2020), 11 Likert-scale questions on student perception of open pedagogy (based on Werth & Williams, 2021), five Likert-scale questions and three check-all-that-apply questions on student perception of the specific Photovoice project (based on Hollister, 2020), and five Likert-scale plus three open-ended questions that were developed by the investigators specifically for this study. Several questions from the survey can be found in Tables 1 and 2; the full student survey can be found on Open Science Framework (Biddle, 2023).…”

“…For example, Jhangiani (2017) calls these types of assignments “renewable” to contrast them with the “disposable” assignments that are only used to achieve a grade in class and are forgotten after. Examples of “renewable assignments” include blog posts, Wikipedia articles, test banks, and OER textbook creation and editing (Baran et al, 2021; Kruger & Hollister, 2021; Werth & Williams, 2021). Hegarty (2015) emphasizes eight attributes of open pedagogy, including participatory technology, innovation and creativity, sharing ideas and resources, reflective practice, people and trust, connected community, learner-generated, and peer-reviewed.…”

Teaching Open and Reproducible Scholarship: A Critical Review of the Evidence Base for Current Pedagogical Methods and their Outcomes

“…This confidence and feelings that the students can contribute to knowledge both in education and in their future professional fields, can build in learners an approach of inquiring and questioning knowledge more effectively, despite their socio-economic background.Similarly, students' affective engagement is also promoted through use of open educational resources. For example,Afolabi (2017) showed how such resources are seen as an advantage by students, who particularly agreed with statements such as they "makes learning more meaningful" and they are "a positive innovation" (p. 117) Werth and Williams (2021). also qualitatively investigated the effect of pedagogy informed by open educational resources on students' motivation and engagement with students' learning.…”

Learning to be open: instructor growth through open pedagogy

“…DeRosa and Robison (2017) note that using open pedagogy moves learning to a student-centred approach by shifting the concept of knowledge from something static to a socially-developed construct in which students may participate. Recent studies indicate that OER-enabled pedagogy may impact a variety of other educational outcomes, such as student creativity, involvement in their own learning, grades, self-directed motivation, student engagement, and skill acquisition (Tillinghast, 2020;Werth & Williams, 2021a, 2021bWiley et al, 2017).…”