Open educational resources (OER) tear down the barriers of access and cost that are most harmful to underprivileged students, but how OER permit us to transform our classrooms has often been overlooked. With adaptable, interactive "open pedagogy," we may discover powerful ways to empower students to learn based on their unique skills and goals.
This session will share the results of a 2016-7 classroom research study (in progress at the time of writing this proposal) assessing the impact of open pedagogy and resources on student skills mastery and perception across modalities. Approximately 200 students in English 101 and 102 participated. All sections used the same free OER, but about half were given traditional assignments (i.e. formal essays and grammar exercises) and the other half were given "open" assignments that involved designing and remixing open resources. Assignment results and other course metrics were used to investigate the impact on student skills mastery and anonymous surveys were used to investigate the impact on the students' perception of the relevance of English class to their lives outside of school. Because of the study's design, we can also evaluate the effects of this treatment on subsets of participants by their course participation (in-class or online) and modality (traditional or flex/hybrid).
