Open Educational Resources (OER) advocate David Wiley challenges college teachers to rethink what he calls "disposable assignments." These are the all too familiar assignments which no one but the student and the professor ever see. Students generally dislike doing them, teachers dislike grading them and they up in the trash. Though there may be some intrinsic learning value in the process of doing them, disposable assignments "add no value to the world" beyond the classroom. This is a shame, but it does not always have to be this way. Students are capable of great work that could be shared and used more widely to the benefit of other students, educators, and the broader public.

Based on ideas central to Open Pedagogy and using OER tools like Creative Commons licensing, Wiley instead proposes "renewable assignments". These can take many forms, but a key feature is that such student work builds off openly available resources and creates value for the larger common good. By widening the potential audience, students can be inspired to do better work which teachers can actually enjoy grading and proudly share to larger audiences.
Giulia Forsythe (Public Domain Image on Flickr)
For example, in a class about digital technologies and tools, Wiley asked students to compare and contrast blogs and wikis. This could have taken the disposable form of a paper written by a student in isolation to be graded by the professor alone to be returned to the student who then places the paper in the recycling bin. Instead, he asked students to find openly licensed content they could reuse or remix to make their point. One result is this ingenious video which repurposes public domain video footage from the famous Kennedy Nixon debate . The result is educational, funny, and with over 50,000 views has added more to the cultural conversation about this topic than a school paper ever could.

Closer to home, students in bands in ETSU’s Old-time Music Program have begun to create blog posts for songs and tunes they learn and perform . The posts usually include biographical information about the original artists, lyrics, chord charts and other technical details about the songs. Not only does this create a nascent archive for the program, such blogs contribute to the larger public appreciation and spread of this area’s unique musical heritage.

Learn more about OER and the OER Awards Program . The Open Textbook Network Workshop is full this semester, look for it again next Fall.

Tuesday March 26, 2-3:30PM, 433 Sherrod Library

Thursday March 28, 3-4:30PM, 433 Sherrod Library

Last Friday of Every Month at Noon
433 Sherrod Library