The Public Good of Open Pedagogy
Two community college students write about the Vietnam War in their first-year US history course.
One is assigned an essay. They gather their research, write the paper, and turn it in. The instructor reads it, grades it, and hands it back. Their writing leaves behind no legacy and is not shared beyond the classroom. In all likelihood, no one else will ever read it.
The other contributes an account of a relative’s crossing out of Vietnam in 1975 to a chapter of the openly licensed textbook their course is built upon. Their peers and instructor read the narrative and offer meaningful feedback that shapes the chapter, not just the grade. Their work lives on through the OER long after they graduate, with each new group of students arriving to find it there.
The first student was given a disposable assignment: hours of effort, minutes of an instructor’s attention, and nothing left standing afterward. Work like this is produced to be graded and then discarded.
The second was given a renewable assignment, an invitation to co-create the text they were learning from by adding the stories, voices, and local histories that a standard US history text cannot hold. Work like this is produced to outlast the assignment itself.
The difference between those two assignments is open pedagogy: teaching that builds on openly licensed materials and treats students as co-creators of knowledge, rather than only its consumers.
Defining open pedagogy
Instead of a fixed definition, DeRosa and Jhangiani (2017) describe open pedagogy as “an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education” and a way of building the conditions for students to add to the knowledge commons. Wiley and Hilton (2018) propose the term “OER-enabled pedagogy” and a four-part test for whether a practice qualifies, based on criteria that distinguish between four types of assignments:
| Disposable assignment | Authentic assignment | Constructionist assignment | Renewable assignment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Student creates an artifact | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Artifact has value beyond supporting its author’s learning | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Artifact is made public | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Artifact is openly licensed | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
A disposable assignment is made and graded. An authentic assignment is useful to someone besides its author. A constructionist assignment is shared publicly. A renewable assignment is openly licensed so others can reuse and adapt it.
Beyond the classroom
Adding to the knowledge commons is not only a classroom ideal but, increasingly, the language of international policy. UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (2019) calls on member states to support the creation and sharing of openly licensed materials. The United Nations’ Global Digital Compact (2024) recognizes open content as a digital public good that can help societies reach the Sustainable Development Goals.
In their article, “Open Educational Practices as Digital Public Goods: Promoting Resilience, Equity and Innovation in Higher Education Ecosystems,” Atenas et al. (2026) argue that the pedagogical practices behind open content are digital public goods in their own right, since the content does not exist without the people who create, adapt, and share it. By their logic, open pedagogy is a digital public good, too – one that students help produce.
Open pedagogy in practice
Since 2019, Houston community college students have contributed local histories to Our Story: An Ancillary to US History (Ross-Nazzal, 2018), open under CC BY-NC, like the family crossing out of Vietnam that opened this piece.
Students at the University of Leeds edited Learning with AI (Davies & Ahsan, 2025), a collection of first-hand accounts from those studying with generative AI, shared under CC BY-NC-SA. This is a living text with an open call for the next cohort of contributors.
Instructors in the UN Sustainable Development Goals Open Pedagogy Fellowship (Baker et al., 2021) created renewable assignments across disciplines, each mapped to an SDG and published as a toolkit (CC BY-NC) for institutions that want to run a fellowship of their own.
Visit the student-lead publishing collection on the Pressbooks Directory for more examples.
Invited, not required
Students are ordinarily the copyright holders of what they create. Sharing or licensing that work is their call, not the instructor’s. Wiley and Hilton (2018) argue that there is no ethical scenario in which faculty require students to openly license their work. DeRosa and Jhangiani (2017) make the same argument from the student’s side: declining to share is an exercise of those rights, not a rejection of openness. The Open Pedagogy Student Toolkit (Witman, 2023) gives students the language for that decision and links to sample agreements for recording it (CC BY).
The Rebus Foundation’s own Amber Hoye (2026) recounts students making exactly that decision in the career-preparation course she taught at Boise State University before joining Rebus. Language majors cloned her CC0-licensed ePortfolio template (Hoye, 2024), explored creators’ rights through the toolkit, and chose licenses for their own work. When some chose more restrictive licenses, she supported those decisions as evidence of the very agency the assignment was meant to build.
Where to start
The tools below support the practical application of open pedagogy, with student agency at its center:
- Open Pedagogy Basics (The Rebus Foundation, 2025b): A free webinar introducing co-creation, renewable assignments, and community projects. CC BY-NC-SA.
- Co-Creating with Students Worksheet (The Rebus Foundation, 2025a): A guided worksheet for redesigning one existing assignment as a renewable one. CC BY-NC-SA.
- “Licensing” in A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students (Mays, 2017): Walks instructors through how students choose whether, how, and under what license their work is shared. This Rebus guide is also where DeRosa and Jhangiani’s framing was first published in full. CC BY.
- Office Hours: Talking to Students about Open Licenses (The Rebus Foundation, 2020): Co-hosted with the Open Education Network, a recorded panel discussion on how librarians, faculty, and administrators talk with students about licensing choices and creators’ rights. CC BY.
- Student Project Agreement Form Template (University of Houston Libraries, n.d.): Customizable template for students’ licensing, identification, and credit decisions. CC BY.
- The Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap (Riehman-Murphy & McGeary, 2021): A self-paced guide for planning and sustaining a larger project. CC BY-NC.
For a deeper look, Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations (Clifton & Davies Hoffman, 2020) offers case studies across disciplines (CC BY), and Pedagogy Opened: Innovative Theory and Practice (Tijerina, 2024) examines open pedagogy through research and reflection (CC BY).
Your invitation
We recognize the time and effort open pedagogy demands and hope the resources above make it easier to take the first step. We invite every practitioner reading to put open pedagogy into practice by redesigning an assignment. Start small with just one disposable assignment that asks real effort of students yet gives their work nowhere to go. Find opportunities for students to create something with value beyond themselves. Let each student decide how far their work travels: kept in the course, shared publicly, or openly licensed for others to use. Every commons is built one contribution at a time. Open pedagogy teaches students that their work can become a public good, an invaluable lesson that outlasts the assignment itself.
Acknowledgments
By: Victoria Brame
Victoria Brame is an open education advocate and marketing professional at The Rebus Foundation, where she supports initiatives that advance open education and learner access.
Rebus
The Rebus Foundation operates on the unceded territory of the Kanienʼkehá:ka Nation in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), land long stewarded by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. We honour Indigenous histories and are committed to ongoing learning, reconciliation, and decolonization in our work.
References
Atenas, J., Nascimbeni, F., & Havemann, L. (2026). Open educational practices as digital public goods: Promoting resilience, equity and innovation in higher education ecosystems. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2026(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.1021
Baker, D., Crefton, C., Nizami, U., Witman, J., Milliken, J., Jhangiani, R., DeRosa, R., Mills, M., & Ghanem, C. (2021). UN Sustainable Development Goals open pedagogy fellowship: A toolkit for instructors and institutions. Kwantlen Polytechnic University. https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/unsdgtoolkit/
Clifton, A., & Davies Hoffman, K. (Eds.). (2020). Open pedagogy approaches: Faculty, library, and student collaborations. Milne Library Publishing. https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/openpedagogyapproaches/
Davies, O., & Ahsan, A. (Eds.). (2025). Learning with AI: A student edited collection. University of Leeds. https://leeds.pressbooks.pub/learningwithai/
DeRosa, R., & Jhangiani, R. (2017). Open pedagogy. In E. Mays (Ed.), A guide to making open textbooks with students (pp. 5-12). Rebus Community. https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/
Hoye, A. (2024). An ePortfolio template for language majors. Boise State University. https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/world300template/
Hoye, A. (2026, Spring). Using an openly licensed ePortfolio template to support student agency in a career preparation course for language majors. The AAEEBL ePortfolio Review, 21-31. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y0znBN6J_Pjbo5ccSzFpng-TYZc4cISR/view?usp=sharing
Mays, E. (Ed.). (2017). A guide to making open textbooks with students. Rebus Community. https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/
The Rebus Foundation. (2020, August 24). Office hours: Talking to students about open licenses [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/biuOoaTTmho
The Rebus Foundation. (2025a). Co-creating with students [Worksheet]. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-cJWeQA71qx9oSStoxhRo2PDXjhJcnb0uvgYptaWl0U
The Rebus Foundation. (2025b, July 16). Open pedagogy basics [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/Da9OH4zgJuE
Riehman-Murphy, C., & McGeary, B. (2021). The open pedagogy project roadmap. Pennsylvania State University. https://oeproadmap.psu.edu/
Ross-Nazzal, J. (2018). Our story: An ancillary to US history: From pre contact to post factual America. Pressbooks. https://pressbooks.pub/ourstory/
Tijerina, T. (Ed.). (2024). Pedagogy opened: Innovative theory and practice. University of North Georgia Press. https://ung.edu/university-press/books/pedagogy-opened-innovative-theory-and-practice.php
UNESCO. (2019). Recommendation on open educational resources (OER). https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-open-educational-resources-oer
United Nations. (2024). Global Digital Compact. https://www.un.org/global-digital-compact/en
University of Houston Libraries. (n.d.). Student project agreement form [Word template]. https://guides.lib.uh.edu/ld.php?content_id=75004577
Wiley, D., & Hilton, J. L., III. (2018). Defining OER-enabled pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(4), 133-147. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i4.3601
Witman, J. (2023). The open pedagogy student toolkit. Open Education Network. https://pressbooks.pub/openpedstudenttoolkit/
Lead Photo: Charlotte May from Pexel