If OER is “what you teach” then Open Educational Practices (OEP) can be considered “how you teach.”

David Wiley states that “OER-enabled pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you have permission to engage in the 5R activities," retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute.  The OER Starter Kit Workbook says that Open Educational Practices are "a series of practices which involve engaging students in a course through the development, adaptation, or use of open educational resources.”

OEP Assignments

An area in which OEP can have a big impact is how we structure our assignments given to students. "Disposable assignments," as David Wiley calls them, are "assignments that students complain about doing and [teachers] complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away." What if assignments instead lived beyond the grading period or the class to hold value to the student, teacher, or community? What if we used "renewable assignments" so that student products are openly licensed and future students can continue to build upon and add to the knowledge ecosystem? This idea is not exclusive to using free, open resources, but these types of teaching practices can certainly be amplified with the integration of OER.

Quill West and others compiled a list of Open Pedagogy Assignments and lessons learned from implementing them. Their document includes tasks such as:

• Editing and adding to a course text
• Creating a course bibliography or glossary
• Develop test bank questions
• Contribute to course study guides

The Open Pedagogy Notebook offers these additional examples of OEPs:

• Adapt or remix OERs with your students.
• Build OERs with your students.
• Teach your students how to edit Wikipedia articles. 
• Facilitate student-created and student-controlled learning environments.
• Encourage students to apply their expertise to serve their community.
• Engage students in public chats with authors or experts. Platforms such as Twitter can help engage students in scholarly and professional conversations with practitioners in their fields. In addition, if students are sharing work publicly, they can also use social media channels to drive mentors, teachers, peers, critics, experts, friends, family, and the public to their work for comment.
• Build course policies, outcomes, assignments, rubrics, and schedules of work collaboratively with students. 
• Let students curate course content.
• Ask critical questions about “open.” When you develop new pathways based on Open Pedagogy, pay special attention to the barriers, challenges, and problems that emerge.

For additional assignment ideas, check out Open Education Group's examples of OER-enabled pedagogy.

ISKME's Open Educational Practice Rubric defines a set of open educational practices that help educators to advance a classroom and school culture of open education and to advocate for the potential benefits of open educational resources (OER) in the context of continuous improvement.

Reflection

Brainstorm possible renewable assignments for your class(es). Do you already assign work that could be defined as renewable? How would the addition of open educational resources into your curriculum affect your teaching practices? In what ways can you you implement more open educational pedagogies into your teaching?