Course Design Resources

This 3 minutes video explains the role of learning outcomes in the design of curriculum. The goal is to design assessments and teaching and learning activities that align with the desired learning outcomes we want our students to achieve.

We've created resources that will help you design your Moodle course for online delivery.

• Moodle course design planning checklist
• Moodle Summer and Fall course site template

Additional Resources

• Infographic: Supporting student learning online: cognitive load
• Infographic: Supporting student metacognition and self-regulation

We understand that selecting the right tools for the job may be hard and there are likely many technologies out there. The following resources were made to help with selecting not only the right technology for teaching, but also what tools KPU already have in our environment and also what technologies compliment well with our existing ecosystem.

• View our interactive learning technology ecosystem
• View our Guide to Interactive App Selection (GIAS)
• How to select the best e-learning tool for your classroom?

What is Open Pedagogy?

Open pedagogy involves taking a learner-centered approach to teaching. Often, students are invited to work on assignments or create resources that have an audience beyond the instructor.

Open pedagogy can include:

• creating, adapting, or updating open educational resources (OER) with students,
• building course policies, outcomes, assignments, rubrics, and schedules of work collaboratively with students,
• or facilitating student-created and student-controlled learning environments.

 In short, you design with students, not for students.

Why Open Pedagogy now?

The COVID-19 pandemic has likely had a huge impact on your teaching practice, and you may be feeling overwhelmed. Your students likely feel the same. However, taking small steps towards open pedagogy can help you tackle problems that this move to remote teaching has caused in your courses. For example, your students might be living in different locations, caring for family members, or lacking access to technology. Designing course policies up front with students will prevent you having to find a work-around for different students during the semester.

Guiding Principles

(Adapted from Hegarty 2015)

When you’re designing for open pedagogy, you might want to think about the following guiding principles:

• Student agency: Students might choose how to display their learning. If your students are engaging in public scholarship, they should have a choice about how they want to share their work. For example, not every student is comfortable with blogging publicly. Students might also have a choice in content type (creating a video, podcast, blog or essay, for example).
• Learner-generated: In open pedagogy, students are empowered to lead, solve problems and work collectively to produce something meaningful.
• Openness and trust: Building trust will allow students to do their best work.
• Connected community and sharing: Most open pedagogy projects have some form of community building and sharing. Students may share with each other, and with the larger community. Often, this happens through sharing technologies like blogs, wikis, or social media. Many open pedagogy projects involve the creation of OER. Students may also share feedback through peer review.
• Reflection: In many open pedagogy projects, students reflect on their process. Sometimes, faculty choose to reward the process rather than (or at least as much as) the product to allow students to experiment.
• Innovation and Creativity: Often, open pedagogy approaches are designed to help students innovate and think creatively about problems. These two skills are highly sought-after by employers.

Dipping your toe into Open Pedagogy

You don’t have to radically change your course to practice open pedagogy. Even small moves towards open pedagogy can have a big impact. These include:

• Designing a rubric for an existing assignment with students.
• Collaboratively developing a particular course policy with your students. 
• Creating an assignment with your students (even if it’s only a small assignment for bonus credit). For example, if one of your assignments is difficult to do remotely, you might have students come up with an alternative that meets the learning outcomes. 
• Giving students the option of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in their work. For example, students could blog about their perceptions and experiences.
• Having students review material from an introductory course by creating something (a poster/ infographic/ comic etc) that teaches a topic you want to review to students of the intro course. You might choose to share particularly well-done examples with students of the intro class.
• Having students revise a chapter of an open textbook that you’re considering adopting.

Learn more about Open Pedagogy

If you’re interested in open pedagogy, browse the Open Pedagogy Notebook, which contains ideas from instructors around the world.

You can also visit KPU’s Open Pedagogy site to be connected to more resources.

Coming soon!