UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Two Penn State University Libraries employees received Open Education (OE) Global’s 2022 Open Education Award for Excellence in Open Pedagogy. Christina Riehman-Murphy, open and affordable educational resources librarian and Sally W. Kalin Librarian for Learning Innovations, and Bryan McGeary, learning design and open education engagement librarian, received the award for their Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap.
Open pedagogy is a reflective, high-impact practice that engages with students as creators of knowledge, rather than solely consumers of it, by leveraging situated, renewable assignments that emphasize collaboration, authentic audiences, and student agency. It often relies upon or leads to the production of open educational resources (OER), allowing the products of student learning to have a wide-reaching impact.
“Collaborating with students on contributing to public knowledge within their course work is highly engaging for both students and faculty alike. It might involve authoring an anthology chapter, customizing a textbook, writing for the web, or editing Wikipedia, but it brings additional considerations for faculty to navigate to ensure that students have agency over their contributions,” Riehman-Murphy said.
Riehman-Murphy and McGeary created the Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap as a resource to guide faculty through the process of planning, implementing, sustaining and sharing open pedagogy projects for their own courses. A practical resource that is useful at any stage in developing or iterating an open pedagogy project, the Roadmap is currently being used at multiple institutions nationally and internationally.
“When we first got involved with open pedagogy projects, there wasn’t a singular resource like this to help us think through all the aspects of this work, so we had to learn some things as we went along through trial and error,” McGeary said. “Part of our motivation behind creating this resource was to help others avoid having to learn those lessons on the fly.”
The Open Pedagogy Award is a special merit award presented in recognition of innovative open teaching practices that incorporate openness in several levels of the learning process, engaging not only in the production, use and reuse of content but also promoting effective open teaching practices. It is one of fifteen OE Global awards presented across 15 categories in 2022.
“Christina Riehman-Murphy and Bryan McGeary fully embody the principles of open education by openly sharing their expertise with the world in creative and practical ways,” said Rebecca Miller Waltz, associate dean for learning and engagement. “They are international leaders in open education, and I am thrilled that learners and instructors within and beyond Penn State are able to benefit from the perspectives, experiences and passion that they bring to this work.”
OE Global is an international, members-based, nonprofit organization supporting the development and use of open education around the world. OE Global’s hundreds of members come from across all education sectors. Penn State joined OE Global as an institutional member in 2020. Riehman-Murphy and McGeary created the Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap as their capstone project when they were fellows in the 2020–21 SPARC Open Education Leadership Program.