Module C1: Student Outcomes & Assessment

Module C1: Student Outcomes & Assessment Worksheet

Overview

Sections A and B asked you to consider the big picture in terms of scope and support for your project. You have already determined the content and a possible process for this work, but in Section C we want you to further refine your thinking. Open pedagogy is an opportunity to move beyond content mastery to developing content-agnostic knowledge practices and dispositions. Can you make your learning outcomes less focused on content and more about process? How do you intend to assess the outcomes? It may help to consider your project within the Typology of Open Educational Practices developed by Bali, Cronin, and Jhangiani (2020).

This kind of open pedagogy work might be completely new and unfamiliar for students and may cause anxiety for them. As you think about potential authentic audiences students will be engaging with and how you might be assessing their work, the Open Pedagogy and Student Discomfort model can help you anticipate how students might react to the challenge level you’re inviting them to collaborate in and how you might adjust to address those feelings (Hofer et al., 2021).

Activity

What are some ways that you can decenter content and make knowledge practices and dispositions the underlying focus of your learning outcomes? You may want to consider the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education as a starting point.
How will students be contributing to knowledge creation, influencing pedagogy, or participating in scholarly or learning communities and activities?
How do you intend to assess student performance? What kinds of assessments will help you demonstrate that this approach is meeting the learning outcomes? No matter how much agency you have over your grading methodology, there are three things you can incorporate into your process in order to foster an open environment.

- Peer review: Open work is often collaborative in nature, and it is aimed at decentering the primacy of the instructor. Giving students the opportunity to learn from one another by providing peer feedback aids in this decentering. If the audience for the open pedagogy project is future students, this can also be an important step for considering tone, approach, and coverage.
- Revision: You may not be able to take a radical approach to grading, but giving students the opportunity to revise will increase their comfort with open work and allow them to focus more on the process of learning and obsess less over grades. Also, revision saves you editorial effort further down the line when it’s time to openly share the output(s).
- Reflection: Having students write reflections can be a good, low-stakes way to assess knowledge practices and dispositions.

***If administrators are skeptical about you taking an open pedagogical approach or if you want to communicate the value of your project (in dossiers, applications, conference papers and presentations, etc.), you may also want to consider some additional assessment that can demonstrate increased student success compared to your previous approach.