For our study, we worked with eight faculty members from across the Northeast to implement renewable assignments in their courses. The faculty represented two-year and four-year colleges as well as public and private institutions, and three of them came from minority-serving institutions. They taught courses in a range of disciplines, including mathematics, biology, political science, and English literature. Their students were also diverse: Of those who shared demographic information, 42 percent were first-generation college students, 28 percent reported receiving Pell grants, and another 28 percent said they grew up in a household where a language other than English was spoken.
We developed a survey that the faculty distributed to students at the end of the course to collect their thoughts on the renewable assignments. The students’ responses uncovered a number of benefits that renewable assignments can offer.
First, students reported higher levels of enjoyment, autonomy, pride, and motivation with renewable assignments, as compared to traditional assignments. They also reported lower levels of pressure on renewable assignments versus traditional ones. Importantly, students said that renewable assignments provided them more opportunities to share their stories and speak from their experiences than traditional assignments did.
We also found that students who felt they could express their identities well in the renewable assignment wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to more broadly amplify their experiences by publicly sharing their work. Students who chose to make their renewable assignments into open educational resources by publicly sharing them reported feeling more connected to their peers and more skilled in their work than did those who opted to not publicly share. Students who publicly shared their renewable assignments also perceived their existing course materials as being less diverse and inclusive—in fact, one student said that they chose to publicly share their work because there was a lack of diverse racial representation in existing resources on the subject.
These results suggest that faculty who want to help students from different backgrounds and identities share their knowledge and experience and feel represented in the classroom can consider integrating renewable assignments. They can also encourage students to openly license their work and publicly share it. Renewable assignments are one way to get us closer to a world where knowledge and education aren’t limited to people of a certain background or status—where, instead, everyone freely shares and contributes their unique knowledge.
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With the end of affirmative action as we know it, let’s demand more from our elite universities
Lindsey Gwozdz is an associate professor and the scholarly communications librarian at Roger Williams University. She also serves as the Open Education Fellow at the New England Board of Higher Education
Virginia Clinton-Lisell is an associate professor of educational foundations research and a Rose Isabella Kelly Fischer Professor at the University of North Dakota. She is a primary researcher of the open education research fellowship.
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