Learning Tools
Students Teaching Students (Version OER)
The idea of having students teach each other as a way of working toward learning objectives is not new, but with open educational resources, the digital objects that students create in the process can be ethically and legally shared with everyone in the world. This has the potential to increase exponentially the value of the work that a student puts into an assignment because rather than it being work limited to a single, closed-off moment in a classroom, it becomes a real contribution to real learning in the world outside of the classroom.
I call these kinds of open assignments "learning tools" because, ultimately, students are expected not just to report on their knowledge of a concept but to frame their knowledge in a way that may have some real value to some audience. The use of openly-licensed resources here is crucial because, as we've seen, you can't just do whatever you want with intellectual property that you discover on the internet.
What Are Students Doing?
"Learning tools" could be, literally, anything. Rather than telling them to make presentation slides or write an essay or do any other specific thing, give them some basic criteria and let them use their own knowledge and skills to demonstrate mastery of the criteria. The central goal is to get students to actively and relevantly apply knowledge in some meaningful and valuable way (instead of having them work on something that, once it's been graded, gets either literally or figuratively thrown into the trash and forgotten about).
Byte: Students already know how to make certain kinds of things, so opening up the assignment form lets them capitalize on their unique skills to not only show their command of concepts but how those concepts can be meaningfully shared with others in their professional field or personal interest groups.
However you decide to design this kind of open assignment, there are a few things that you should communicate to your students:
- Learning objectives
- Grading rubric
- Basic requirements (applicable to any form)
Without these components, it will be as hard for you to evaluate/assess their work as it will be for them to know what they're expected to demonstrate.
This is loose, I know, so you can find an example of a "renewable learning tool" that I've used with my own students in an English 101 module about rhetoric in this module.
Who Is the Audience?
Part of the value of this kind of open assignment is that the object/tool that the students create is designed (by the student) with a particular audience in mind. To emphasize the real-world relevance of the course concepts, students may be encouraged to consider others in their discipline or who share some other personal or situational characteristic.
Not all students know their major, of course. Some of them might have trouble thinking about the application of the knowledge to their career or academic paths, and others might not know how the content is relevant to their personal lives. In any case, opening up the assignment and obliging them to design a tool with a specific audience in mind moves beyond the idea that knowledge is what you get in school and moves them into the mindset that this stuff is important in life in some way.
As a last resort, you may allow students to consider their peers--other college students taking the same or similar classes--as the audience. Whether they create something that is beneficial to people in their discipline or simply create something to help current and future students might not really matter. The point is that they are expected to apply the knowledge.