Designing High Structure Renewable Assignments as Liberatory Open Education

Abstract

Open Education Practices (OEP) have been proposed as a way to increase both engagement in learning, and lower costs. Broadly, Open Educational Practices involve learners in creating, evaluating, remixing, or otherwise modifying Open Education Resources (OER). Aspirational descriptions of OEP frame them both as liberatory by engaging learners directly with the creation of knowledge which they and others can use to solve their problems (see Bali et al., 2020) and as truly authentic assessments, engaging learners in the types of knowledge creation they will engage in in knowledge careers (see DeRosa & Robison, 2017). One particular form of these assignments, as proposed by Wiley and Hilton, renewable assignments – assignments which can be continually used across semesters and cohorts, and in which learners iteratively improve upon the work of former learners (2018). In this way, both the assignment and materials become ‘renewable’ – because they are reused or renewed continually, rather than being discarded at the end of a quarter. Designing assignments which fulfill the liberatory aspirations of Renewable Assignments requires accounting for a variety of design factors, and integrates a number of theories into a living and technology-enabled practice. This dissertation describes three studies that use mixed methods design research to attempt creating guiding principles for the design of renewable assignments, and practices that center ethical open education. These principles are intended to function as a set of theoretical constructs accounting for key factors which can enable renewable assignments and other OEP to fulfill the high aspirations of maximizing their liberatory value. Before describing the three design experiments involved in this dissertation, this dissertation briefly describes the problem space – difficulties in innovation within learning technologies which suggest that renewable assignments may be a viable innovation which, if well designed, holds potential to shift not only technology use, but power structures which limit the benefits of learning and learning technologies to learners. Following this description, this dissertation describes the three design experiments which engage these ideas of renewable assignments as a design space. The first study is a user (learner)-centered mixed methods case study of an endocrinology course engaged in adopting high structured renewable assignments as an attempt to turn a course pack into a student-created open textbook. This research centers the perspective of learners and teachers in what practices are effective, as well as what practices they feel themselves engaging in most deeply. Finding the concepts of student voice and creating a conversation between student work and feedback as important theoretical points within this learning ecosystem, our research continues with a theoretical inquiry into equity in student voice within open educational practices. We compare findings in high structure active learning design with José Medina’s work The Epistemology of Resistance (Medina, 2013) to discuss the epistemological value of learning design in group learning in general, and open education practices specifically. In the final set of experiments, we engaged with learners and teachers in three different courses: one an honors course about the local ecosystem, a second, environmental science course about writing about ecological matters, and third a comparative history of ideas course about the literature of environmental justice. Using similar methods across all these courses, we evaluated student work created in response to assignment conditions with increased, and decreased, structure which our discussion of group epistemology suggested may impact the equity of student voice and feedback within assignments. We describe the new directions that the findings suggest in continued research into ethical, adoptable, and effective open educational practices and their supporting technologies. We conclude with an evaluation of the ways in which these experiments further develop the liberatory potential of renewable assignments specifically and liberatory educational practices broadly. These evaluations suggest particular principles which can be broadly used by educators, groups of learners, and technology designers to create learning experiences which maximize the liberatory values and the learning effectiveness of renewable assignments. Finally, we suggest future research in the same line, including the similarities between design principles suggested by this research and the practices of agile software design, overlaps which reveal principles of structured renewable assignments that may be broadly applicable to various groups which seek to create or refine knowledge together.