The definition of open educational practices (OEP) is ever changing in the open education community, and recent years has seen this definition shift to encompass pedagogical practices that have less of a focus on OER and focus on advancing social justice in our classroom spaces (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018; Croft & Brown, 2020). However, the discussion falls short when talking about student assessment in a course, and as a result, grading practices often come in direct conflict with the ideals and values that underpin OEP.
Because OEP has a strong focus on student autonomy and empowerment, it results in a shift in the traditional relationship between student and instructor, usually with a focus on knowledge creation, but we would argue that shift can and does occur when employing collaborative grading practices (ungrading) where students have input and can discuss their learning and the resulting grade in the course with the instructor. Students themselves have a much better sense of the work they have put into a course and as a result, a much better sense of their learning in a course. Traditional grading systems have been shown to not be reliable when measuring student learning and to also perpetuate harm on students in the process. Because employing OEP in the classroom requires developing a relationship of trust between instructors and students, those traditional grading practices can and do create conflict.
In addition, traditional grading practices can expand the equity gap, disproportionally harming students that come from underserved populations. As a basic example, simple averaging of grades across a term will favor students that were better prepared at the beginning for the course in question, despite students being at the same point at the end of the term. There is no room in this system to account for the differences in the learning gains. Here, we argue that collaborative grading practices seek to advance representational justice (Lambert, 2018), giving students power and voice to their own experiences in the classroom, and taking into consideration their experiences outside of the classroom as well.
In this session, two practitioners of ungrading will speak to their journeys in adopting alternative assessment in their courses, one who came to it through the lens of open pedagogy and creating OER with her students, and one who arrived at it from an equity standpoint, without OER as an impetus. Together, we will argue that because collaborative grading practices challenge traditional teaching practices and are rooted in constructivist and connectivist pedagogies, it should be considered an open educational practice, decoupled from the creation of OER.
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[Session 11C]: WIL and MicrocredentialsReferencesCroft, B., & Brown, M. (2020). Inclusive open education: Presumptions, principles, and practices. Distance Education, 41(2), 156-170. Cronin, C., & MacLaren, I. (2018). Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices. Open praxis, 10(2), 127-143. Lambert, S. R. (2018). Changing our (dis) course: A distinctive social justice aligned definition of open education. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3).
Author KeywordsAlternative Assessment, Ungrading, Collaborative Grading, Open Educational Practice, Social Justice, Equity
