Renew.
Renewable assignments are good for the instructor.
Stacy Katz and Jennifer Van Allen have done a good job of summarizing our basic understanding of what renewable assignments are:
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Renewable assignments, as opposed to disposable assignments, are defined as tasks in which students compile and openly publish their work so that the assignment outcome is inherently valuable to the community (Chen, 2018; Wiley & Hilton, 2018). Wiley and Hilton (2018) have defined categories of assignments to show the spectrum between those that are disposable and renewable. In their criteria, assignments can be sorted as disposable, authentic, constructionist, and renewable. The disposable assignment which involves a student-created artifact submitted to the instructor, meets the most basic criterion of any assignment. When the value of that artifact extends beyond the students’ own learning, such as the creation of content tutorials for future classes, it falls into the category of an authentic assignment. In the constructionist assignment, students make an authentic assignment publicly available. To be considered renewable, the teacher invites the students to openly license and publicly share their work with the global community. In some cases, renewable assignments may be originally developed by the students, and in others, students may remix or adapt existing OER (Wiley & Hilton, 2018).
I’ve often wondered about Wiley and Hilton’s categories. Their devotion to open pedagogy is what drives the hierarchy of the schema to equate renewable assignments with openness, which is fine, but I don’t if that makes the artefact really that much more valuable than those at the authentic or constructionist stage. (And while we’re at it, another quibble: I find it hard to understand what connects a “constructionist” artefact to public availability.)
In order to understand what might motivate an instructor to include renewable assignments in their courses, we can turn to Erin Beattie:
The benefits that I saw were the following:
Authentic mentorship. The assignment gave me an opportunity to mentor students in an environment in which the end goal was an essay intended for practitioners and researchers. In doing so, we often engaged in conversations about the goal of the project, the audience, and the outcomes that each student wanted for their essay. Such mentorship was personally satisfying and fulfilling.
Align my research with my teaching. Faculty members engage in diverse activities, and I’m a firm believer in engaging in activities that benefit multiple areas of my work. In other words, my research, teaching, and service often overlap and inform one another. By creating a renewable assignment that addressed my learning objectives and was aligned with my research, my students and I were able to produce scholarship that was of value to the field, as well as address the goals of my research agenda.
Enable students to publish their work. Beyond the personal benefits that students might accrue by engaging in renewable assignments, I found it immensely rewarding to see my students’ work being published and hear them describe that they felt empowered and supported. Importantly, our book was published by Hybrid Pedagogy, which practices collaborative peer review and treats the peer review process as pedagogical.
Better collaboration. It was much more pleasurable to work with students toward our shared goal. I found that this process eliminated some of the power imbalances and hierarchies in the classroom, enabling us to collaborate more effectively.
The key benefit in this example is that the instructor and the students collaborated on knowledge creation. That’s valuable work, and should be of interest to any instructor who gets frustrated by students who seem to be motivated solely by grades.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
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