These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. Talk about an incredible waste of time and brain power (an a potentially huge source of cognitive surplus)!
What if we changed these “disposable assignments” into activities which actually added value to the world? Then students and faculty might feel different about the time and effort they invested in them. I have seen time and again that they do feel different about the efforts they make under these circumstances.
— David Wiley, What is Open Pedagogy?
- Renewable assignments: Student work adding value to the world (Christina Hendricks, University of British Columbia)
- Replacing ‘disposable assignments’ for ‘open assignments’: a solution to increase student experience and engagement (Debbie Smith, University of Manchester, Open Knowledge in Higher Education)
- The Non-Disposable Assignment: Enhancing Personalised Learning (Michael Paskevicius and Liesel Knaack, Vancouver Island University)
- The Challenge of Non-Disposable Assignments (Alan Levine, CogDogBlog)
- Ditching the “Disposable Assignment” in Favor of Open Pedagogy (Rajiv S. Jhangiani, Society for the Teaching of Psychology)
Featured Image: flickr photo by petrr shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
