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Open Pedagogy: Student-Centered Learning: Home

Overview

Student-Centered Learning
STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING in the context of open pedagogy empowers students to take an active role in their education by emphasizing knowledge co-creation, open assignments, and peer collaboration. Through open assignments, students produce renewable work with real-world applications, while peer collaboration fosters teamwork, civil engagement, and mutual learning through feedback and shared projects. This approach enhances engagement, contributed to public knowledge, builds critical thinking skills, and promotes an inclusive, participatory learning environment.

Student-Centered Learning Topics

It can be difficult to pull apart the concepts of knowledge co-creation, open assignments, and peer collaboration. Below is a comparison of knowledge co-creation assignments, some within open pedagogy and some outside of open pedagogy.

Knowledge Co-Creation Assignment Comparison

Within Open Pedagogy

  • Co-Creating OER: Students collaborate with faculty to create open textbooks, digital resources, or videos that future learners can use.
  • Open Research Projects: Students and faculty work together on research projects, making the findings publicly available through open-access journals.
  • Crowdsourced Course Content: Students contribute case studies or examples to a growing database used in future iterations of a course.
  • Collaborative Annotations: Using platforms like Hypothes.is, students collectively annotate texts, sharing insights and building a collective understanding.
  • Student-Led Syllabus Design: Students collaborate with faculty to co-create the syllabus and course structure, choosing topics and resources.
  • Public Wikis: Students create and edit public wiki pages on course topics to share their learning with a wider audience.

Outside of Open Pedagogy

  • Collaborative Group Projects: Students work together to produce shared outputs like group presentations or research papers in traditional classroom settings.
  • Lab Research Teams: Students work in research labs, contributing data and co-authoring papers without the OER context.
  • Community Design Projects: Engineering or architecture students co-create physical models or designs for local infrastructure, shared internally.
  • Service Learning: Students partner with local communities to co-create solutions for social problems, such as public health campaigns.
  • Crowdsourced Data Collection: Students in a geography class contribute to a collective map using GPS tools to document land features.
  • Hackathons: Participants, often students and professionals, collaborate in short, intense workshops to develop software, solutions, or tools, usually in the tech industry.

Open assignments result in renewable, public-facing work that engage students in the production of lasting content, such as blog posts, video tutorials, or open textbooks. Student-driven content facilitates personalized learning, allowing learners to choose methods that align with their interests, needs and learning styles. They also promote collaboration and peer review, as students build on each other's work. By incorporating iterative projects, future cohorts can refine and enhance the work, ensuring its longevity and impact. 

Examples

Creating public knowledge: Students create public-facing content that contributes to open knowledge platforms. Examples:

  • Students contribute to a Wikipedia page on a historical event, adding new, verified content based on their research.
  • Students write blog posts on current environmental issues and share them on a class-hosted open website.

Student-driven content: Students choose their project format, creating open resources based on personal interests or course relevance. Examples:

  • Students create digital anthologies of literary works, including analysis and personal reflections.
  • Students develop an infographic on a social justice issue and post it on an open platform.
  • A student designs a series of video tutorials on how to code simple games in Python, sharing them on an open YouTube channel.

Iterative and evolving projects: Projects designed to be expanded upon by future students. Examples:

  • Students develop an open-source software tool that can be iterated on by subsequent classes.
  • Students develop lesson plans using OER, which future cohorts will revise and improve.

Collaboration and peer review: Group projects or peer review where students co-create open content or evaluate each other's contributions. Examples:

  • Teams collaboratively create a market analysis report, which is peer-reviewed by other groups and published for open use.
  • Students collaboratively build a repository of open-access patient case studies, offering peer reviews to improve accuracy and quality.

Other Examples

This is just a small sample to illustrate that there are many more examples freely available online.

Further Reading

  • Toward Renewable Assessments: David Wiley's blog post which popularized the idea of assignments designed to have lasting value beyond the classroom that allow students to create work that contributes to the broader educational community. 

Peer collaboration in open pedagogy empowers students to learn from each other, improve their work through feedback from different perspectives, and create renewable educational resources. Hands-on and participatory learning deepens their engagement, encourages reflective practice, and fosters community.

Collaborative Activities

Group Creation of OER: Students collaborate to develop open educational resources (e.g., open textbooks, multimedia like YouTube videos) that future learners can use. An example would be "In your assigned groups, write a chapter for an open textbook on a key event from the Civil Rights Movement. Each group will focus on a different event, and the final chapters will be published online for use by future history students."

Peer Review and Critique: Students review and provide feedback on each other's work, fostering critical thinking, learning from diverse perspectives, and civil engagement. An example would be "Exchange your research paper on economic theories of income inequality with a classmate and provide feedback based on the provided rubric. Focus on clarity of argument and use of economic models."

Open Annotations: Collaborative tools like Hypothes.is allow students to annotate readings together, sharing insights and reflections in real time. An example would be "Using Hypothes.is, annotate the assigned reading from Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society, adding your insights and questions. Respond to at least two peers’ comments to deepen the discussion."

Open-Ended, Group-Based Projects: Teams of students work on open projects that contribute to the community or are published openly. An example would be "Work in your assigned teams to design an open-source, energy-efficient device to solve a sustainability problem in your community. Your project and documentation will be published online, where others can build on your work."

  • What Do We Mean When We Say Student-Centered Learning? by Christa Green, Kristen DeBruler, and Christopher Harrington, all from Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute - Definitions of student-centered learning, competency-based learning, and personalized learning, and their relationships to each other.