Exploring “What if . . .?” with Renewable Assignments

Exploring “What if . . .?” with Renewable Assignments

What if university assignments contributed to the greater good? What if students had a genuine audience for their assignment work rather than just a faculty member or two? What if our students could contribute to their future professions while at university developing their professional knowledge? This chapter describes an open educational practice called ‘renewable assignments’ (Wiley, 2016) and how it was used to explore these three questions. I am a senior lecturer in the School of Education at a mid-sized regional university in Australia. From 2019 to 2023, I and my colleague Dr Yosheen Pillay conducted and researched renewable assignments in projects that led to 91 students contributing to 4 online books of open educational resources (OER). In this chapter, I explain the ins and outs of the project and provide some advice from my experiences. The chapter begins by outlining the different groups of people involved in the project – including open education support staff, pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and university educators – before explaining the project’s rationale. This is followed by a detailed explanation of how renewable assignments were implemented across undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Education at a mid-sized regional university in Queensland, Australia. The explanation includes details about how action research was built around the activities to ensure that data about specific impacts were captured. In this case, the action research focused on student engagement for two cycles and on graduate employability for another two cycles, and it produced a range of insights into how renewable assignments impact on student experiences. The chapter ends with some recommendations for those interested in running renewable assignments in their own courses and reflections from people who were involved.