Open Pedagogy:  Moving from OER for Students to OER With Students

While many discussions regarding the adoption of OER focus on replacing expensive primary texts, open pedagogy focuses on collaborating with students to curate, adopt, and create OER resources. This approach deepens students’ learning, allows them to produce meaningful and lasting work, and provides opportunities for instructors to mentor students. But how do instructors tackle such lofty goals with limited time and resources?

This workshop focuses on the nuts and bolts of several open pedagogy approaches, including creating primary texts and supplemental teaching materials, such as PowerPoint presentations, explanatory videos, annotation exercises, and test banks. We will discuss best practices of open pedagogy, as well as common pitfalls.

After a successful legal career, Melissa Randall was hired by the Community College of Denver to teach legal classes in the business, criminal justice, and paralegal programs. With her business law students, Ms. Randall published an OER undergraduate business law textbook in May 2020, which has already saved students at least $3.1 million in textbook costs. Ms. Randall has also built multiple OER master classes for the criminal justice and paralegal programs, and is currently creating an integrated OER online paralegal certificate program. She serves on the CCD OER Steering Committee and is helping to reform law enforcement training in Colorado.