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“Student assignments are often very transactional in nature, seen only by the instructor for the purpose of demonstrating content mastery and achievement of learning objectives. This closed feedback loop between the student and instructor has been coined “disposable” by scholars Wiley and Hilton ( 2018) as the assignments are no longer used after the course has concluded. However, the underlying principles of which the term is built upon is not new but stems from educational theorists such as Seymour Papert and his theory of Constructionism, where educators facilitate rather than drive student learning, believing that knowledge construction is most productive when students are creating tangible and shareable learning objects that they perceive as meaningful (Ackerman et al 2009). The recent movement in the open education community that encourages student assignments to have value outside of the course (Wiley et al. 2017) has been coined “renewable” or “nondisposable,” because these assignments can freely and legally be used, adapted and expanded upon by the student or others outside of the course (Seraphin et al. 2019). Examples of renewable assignments include creating websites, editing and contributing to Wikipedia articles, co-creating syllabi with instructors, and creating ancillary material like test bank items (Clinton-Lisell 2021; Wiley and Hilton 2018).”

Disposable vs. Renewable Assignments

Renewable Assignments

Renewable assignments  provide students with opportunities to engage in meaningful work, add value to the world, and provide a foundation for future students to learn from and build upon. Renewable assignments are possible because of the permission to engage in the 5R activities (retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) granted by open educational resources (OER). Renewable assignments are an alternative to traditional, disposable assignments, which some students throw away after they are graded.

David Wiley, the Chief Academic Officer at Lumen Learning, education fellow at Creative Commons, and OER evangelist, discussed the benefits of renewable assignments in a blog post, excerpted below.

“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 ( 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.”  “What is Open Pedagogy?”  by David Wiley  is licensed under CC BY 4.0 

Examples of Renewable Assignments

• Social annotation of a shared reading
• Creating anthology excerpts
• Contributing to an open textbook
• Writing quiz questions
• Creating tutorials or other “learning objects” for their fellow students and/or the public
• Creating a topic website
• Editing Wikipedia entries
• Creating lists of “common problems” or advice for writing, after doing peer review of each others’ work and self-reflecting on their own

Disposable Assignments

“It may be hard for us as faculty to admit to ourselves that many assignments end up being forgotten—dumped in an actual or virtual trash can—once we’ve graded them.” ~Bob Casper, Boise State University

“What I didn’t like about these projects was walking out of the classroom and seeing the large pile of beautifully designed posters simply thrown away. The course was done, their work was done, I had taken a picture, so there was simply no reason that they needed to keep the posters – all I could think about was all the work they had put into them being lost and discarded. I didn’t, however, have an idea of how to prevent that from happening though, aside from not assigning posters anymore.” ~Heather Miceli, Roger Williams University

Examples of Disposable Assignments:

• Discussion boards where students have to answer a question and reply to X number of their peers.
• Deliverables that just get pitched after class (printed posters)
• Reflections without connections to course materials/transparency for why they matter
• Essays only the student and instructor will ever see or that aren’t scaffolded/or don’t see peer review
• Creating media learning objects – images, voicethreads, videos – that only teachers see
• Assignments that feel like busy work

Scenario: From Disposable to Renewable

An instructor would like to build in more engagement around the course readings. Previously, they’ve had students respond to a question on a discussion board by a midweek deadline, and then have them respond to two of their peers by the end of the week. This often turns into the students just reply that they agree with what the poster said, and they’ve noticed that they often just reply to their friends in the course. Students have also expressed frustration with the assignment in their end of the semester evaluations labeling it “pointless” and “busy work.”

The instructor went to an Open Pedagogy workshop and learned about disposable and renewable assignments. The discussion board assignment seems like low hanging fruit to swap out with a new assignment to give it a try. They decide to employ social annotation with their readings instead by using the tool Hypothes.is.

They decide to use the add-on LMS integration in Canvas, to have their students annotate texts together through the tool. They set expectations that the students will annotate any areas of the text that were unclear to them, post some media that relates to the text, or annotate areas that they’d like to build discussion around. They also set aside time in class to orient students to the annotation tool, so that their students can ask questions in real time if there are issues. When their students annotate the texts, they use those annotations to see where students are struggling so they can address them in class, or build class discussions around the parts that most resonated with their students.

Tips for Getting Started

• Start Small – you don’t have to change every assignment in your course. Start with just one to try it out.
• The goal is to create active authentic assessments where students “do” rather than passively participate.
• Make sure to scaffold any new tools, concepts, or assignments and then build in opportunities for knowledge transfer.

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