Non-Disposable Assignments

“If you’ve heard me speak in the last sev­er­al months, you’ve prob­a­bly heard me rail against “dis­pos­able assign­ments.” 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, Killing the Dis­pos­able Assign­ment https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975

Here are some key read­ings and exam­ples of non-dis­pos­able assign­ments (also called renew­able assign­ments or some­times called open ped­a­go­gies). Feel free to check them out.

Read­ings

  • Paske­vi­cius, M. & Knaack, L. (2017). The Non-Dis­pos­able Assign­ment: Enhanc­ing Per­son­al­ized Learn­ing | Slideshare Deck
  • Wiley, D. (2013). What is Open Ped­a­gogy? Iter­at­ing Towards Open­ness | Blog Post
  • DeRosa, R. (n.d.). Reduced Dis­pos­abil­i­ty | Web­site
  • Ragad Anwar; Jes­si­ca Kalra; Mag­gie Ross; Daryl Smith; and Vic­ki Vogel (n.d.). Renew­able Assess­ments Chap­ter in Encour­ag­ing Aca­d­e­m­ic Integri­ty Through a Pre­ven­ta­tive Frame­work | Book
  • Hen­dricks, C. (2015). Non-Dis­pos­able Assign­ments in Intro to Phi­los­o­phy | Blog Post
  • Hen­dricks, C.  (Octo­ber 29, 2015). Renew­able assignem­nts: Stu­dent work adding val­ue to the world | UBC Blog Post
  • Levine, A. (Feb­ru­ary 21, 2017). The Chal­lenge of Non-Dis­pos­able Assign­ments | Blog Post
  • eCam­pus Ontario (Jan­u­ary 16, 2018). An Era of Dis­pos­able Assign­ments? | News Post
  • Seraphin, S. B., et al. (2019). A Con­cep­tu­al Frame­work for Non-Dis­pos­able Assigsn­ments: Inspir­ing Imple­men­ta­tion, Inno­va­tion, and Research | Pub­lished Jour­nal Arti­cle 
  • Katz, S. and Van Allen, J. (2020). Evolv­ing Into the Open: A Frame­work for Col­lab­o­ra­tive Design of Renew­able Assign­ments | Pub­lished Jour­nal Arti­cle

Exam­ples of Non-Dis­pos­able Assign­ments

  • Jhangiani, R. and DeRosa, R. (2018). Open Ped­a­gogy Note­book: Shar­ing Prac­tices, Build­ing Com­mu­ni­ty | Assign­ment Exam­ples  | Web­site
  • Open Edu­ca­tion Group (2017–2018) Renew­able Assign­ments | Web­site
  • Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­tral Flori­da | Fos­ter Mean­ing­ful Learn­ing with Renew­able Assign­ments | Web­site
  • Hen­dricks — Open Ped­a­gogy Exam­ples of Class Activ­i­ties | Web­site
  • Project Man­age­ment for Instruc­tor Design­ers | Open Book (Press­books plat­form) by stu­dents and fac­ul­ty at Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty which now includes mul­ti­ple video case stud­ies; com­plete­ly rewrit­ten exam­ples in-text; align­ment with the Project Man­age­ment Pro­fes­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exam; an expand­ed glos­sary; and down­load­able HTML, PDF, ePub, MOBI, and MP3 ver­sions of the book (among oth­er improve­ments). The book is also used as the offi­cial course text at least one oth­er uni­ver­si­ty.
  • Open Ped­a­gogy Exam­ples | Bcam­pus Google Doc List
  • Chem Wiki which lat­er became a Libre­Text is one of the largests non-dis­pos­able assign­ments through a col­lab­o­ra­tion of stu­dents and fac­ul­ty doing a non-dis­pos­able assign­ment | Chem­istry Libre­Text
  • From Con­sumer to cre­ator: Stu­dents as pro­duc­ters of con­tent | Simon Bates’ Class Cre­at­ing learn­ing objects | Assign­ment Steps | Web­site
  • Beasley-Mur­ray, Jon. (n.d.) Wikipro­ject: Mur­der, Mad­ness, and May­hem. Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Murder_Madness_and_Mayhem
  • NOBA Project — 2016–17 Stu­dent Video Award Win­ners — Stu­dents cre­at­ing resources as assign­ments | Web­site