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Open Pedagogy for Teaching Structures

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0002-0945-4522

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/s9xd-h436

Abstract

There is great potential to improve student engagement and retention by using open resources and pedagogies to teach structures. Open Educational Resources, OER, as defined by OER Commons are “…teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost, and without needing to ask permission”. Open Pedagogy is more difficult to define, but Wiley states that “Open pedagogy is that set of teaching and learning practices only possible in the context of the free access and 5R permissions characteristic of open educational resources.” 2 The “5R permissions” refers to the fundamental basis of sharing open content that allows anyone to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, or Redistribute the content of the resource in question.

After teaching structures for many years, using several different textbooks, with varying results in student engagement and learning outcomes, the author decided to investigate/develop open pedagogies to use in teaching fundamental structural concepts. This paper will focus on the author’s recent experiences in introducing open pedagogies into an existing, second- year, introductory structures course. The primary goal of this experiment was to improve students’ retention of course content and engage them more directly in their coursework by challenging them to find, create and share open content. Another goal was to guide students in creating documents containing pertinent structural design information that they could maintain for use in their future structures courses and design studios. Students were required to create their own websites to store and share their work in the course. This exercise exposed students to the “5R’s” of open content, at a relatively small scale. The course goals and context in which open resources and pedagogy were used will be explained and described. Future potentials for using open pedagogies to teach structures will also be discussed.

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