4 OER as Assessment: Open Pedagogy in a Theatre History Course

Introduction

I began teaching THEA 230, Development of Theatre I, at Boise State University in 2013. The course covered theatre history from the Ancient Greeks to Shakespeare (nearly 2,000 years of theatrical practice). The first two times I taught the class it was in person, but in 2015 I started teaching it online, fully asynchronously. THEA 230 was required for all theatre majors (and minors) and was the first in a four-course sequence. As such, failing THEA 230 could put a student behind a year in their graduation plan.

Knowing that passing the class was important for students, each time I taught THEA 230 I adjusted the course to support student learning (e.g., adding more interactive assignments, hosting synchronous video meetings, being proactive about reaching out to students who were struggling). Despite these efforts, 2-3 students (out of 15-20) failed the course each semester. Some of this could be attributed to students’ busy schedules, as many worked and participated in theatre department productions alongside being full-time students. However, there were other factors affecting student success in the course, including access to the course materials. For example, in the fall of 2018, I reached out to a student who was failing the class to see how I could help her get back on track. The reason she gave for not performing well on the exams was that the person she was sharing the textbook with hadn’t texted her the pictures of the pages, so she had not been able to do the readings.

Having already considered using Open Educational Resources (OER) in the course, that conversation was the impetus I needed to finally make the switch. With a grant from my institution, and support from colleagues in our eCampus Center, I replaced the play anthology and textbook I had been using with an OER anthology, supported by publicly available readings and videos on theatre history.  Because this course covered material from 500 BCE to 1500 CE, it was possible to find versions of plays to use in the OER anthology because many were in the public domain. However, what was not available for free was the introductory material about plays that an anthology typically provides. These introductions usually include a short biography of the playwright, historical context for the play, and information about how the play fits into the evolution of theatre. This gap in my OER materials provided the solution to another challenge within this project, which was replacing the tests on the textbook content.

My solution to both challenges was to create a new summative assessment. This new assignment asked students to write the introduction to one of the plays we read in the OER anthology. Doing so would not only demonstrate their ability to synthesize and apply what they learned in the class, but also help future students understand the context and importance of the plays included in THEA 230. Thus, the assessment method I developed in response to my switch to OER resulted in the students creating new OER course materials each semester.

The Approach

When I originally talked with colleague and OER anthology co-creator, Monica Brown, about moving to OER and the need for new assessments, we saw this switch as an opportunity to implement Open Pedagogy. Open Pedagogy, sometimes also referred to as Open Educational Practices (OEP), was defined by the OPAL project (2011) as “the range of practices around the creation, use, and management of open educational resources with the intent to improve quality and innovate education” (p. 4). Scholars such as Bronwan Hegarty (2015) have further clarified the attributes of Open Pedagogy to include “open tools and processes that promote collaboration and sharing of information and connected communication about learning and teaching” (p. 3). In our discussions, Monica and I used the term Open Pedagogy as defined by David Wiley (2013) as an approach that “clearly leverages the reuse, revise, remix, redistribute permissions of open educational resources in order to enable students to extend and improve the official instructional materials required for the course” (p. 5)

This framing of Open Pedagogy as a method through which students could be knowledge creators (Clinton-Lisel, 2021; DeRosa and Robison, 2017) became the impetus to create the Play Introduction assignment, an assessment that was more authentic than the tests I had previously used. Authentic assessment, as defined by Jon Mueller (2018), is “a form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills” (p. 6). As described to students in the Play Introduction assignment overview, the typical introduction to a play – either in a written format, in a lobby display, or in a preview video done by a theatre – helps readers or audience members understand the historical context of the play, learn important things about the playwright and, ultimately, appreciate more fully the experience of reading or watching the play. In this way, the Play Introduction assignment was an authentic application of the skills and knowledge students learned in the course; it helped them see how they could apply learnings from class within the future and allowed them the opportunity to create work that would teach future students.

The Assignment

The Play Introduction assignment served as the summative assessment for two of the course learning outcomes:

• Analyze orally and in writing the ways past societies have defined the nature and purpose of theatre.
• Form and defend your own aesthetic judgments orally and in writing; consider and evaluate the aesthetic judgments of others orally and in writing.

To do this type of contextual work (for this assignment and in the future), students were asked to research and create an introduction for one of the plays discussed in class. The goal was to compile information that would help future students understand the context and importance of plays within THEA 230.

Preparing Students for the Assignment

For students to develop the skills and knowledge needed to write the Play Introduction, I broke the summative assessment task into scaffolding steps and integrated these steps at the end of each unit. For example, at the end of the first unit, on Ancient Western theatre, students were asked to identify one piece of historical information they thought audiences should know before watching one of the two plays studied. At the end of the second unit, ancient traditions in Eastern theatre, students were asked to make an argument for why one of the plays from that unit would be relevant to a college student audience.

To help students understand all pieces of the assignment and how they were mutually supportive, I used the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework to create the assignment description. The TILT framework encourages instructors to be clear about why course content matters and how students can be successful by outlining an assignment’s details in terms of Purpose, Task and Criteria (Winklemes, 2023). Therefore, the Play Introduction assignment included a clear Purpose statement:

This assignment will bring together the research, writing and synthesis skills we practice and develop in this course.  You will research one of the plays that we discuss in this class and create an introduction for it, with the goal of helping future students understand the context and importance of the plays in this course.

I then outlined the Task by describing the steps students should take to be successful. For example, the description of the task for the Module 5 assignment included these instructions:

1. Answer the following question: what is one piece of historical information you think an audience should have before starting the play? To share your answer to this question, write/record a summary of that information and explain one specific aspect of the play that this information will help the reader understand (Is it the kind of theatre in which it was performed? What religious festival was this play a part of? That the major roles were played by the same three, masked, male actors? The history of the chorus?).
2. Your submission should be directed to me, not to your future audience. It should also be free of editorial/verbal/graphic errors and be approximately 200 words or two minutes long.
3. You will be assessed as follows:

One piece of historical context provided (2 points)

Historical context clearly related to the play (2 points)

Historical context supported by research (includes direct quote/citation in support) (2 points).

Scaffolding steps like these prepared students to successfully complete the final Play Introduction assignment.

The Results

I was amazed to find that grading the Play Introduction took no time at all. Since students had time to practice the skills necessary to complete it, understood what was expected of them, and were able to choose a topic of interest, the work they submitted consistently met the criteria for demonstrating their achievement of the course learning outcomes. Not only was it faster to grade this assignment than the tests I had used previously, reviewing the work was much more enjoyable. For example, one student’s introduction to Hamlet, a play with much historical weight, had a lighthearted tone that made it fun for me to read:

When Hamlet was first performed by Shakespeare’s Company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, on the south side of the Thames, in or about 1601, it wasn’t unusual for a company to present thirty to forty different plays a year . . . Even good tragedy (good tragedy?) gets old, especially at thirty a year.  Shakespeare, though, was a master of mixing tragedy with comic relief. One example of this is in Act Five, Scene One, in which two clowns (gravediggers) philosophize about Christian burials while sharing jokes; just guys at work.  My personal favorite is the truism from the grave digger when, also in Act Five, Scene One, Hamlet asks the clown, “How long will a man lie i’ th’ earth ere he rot?”  And the clown answers, “Faith if a’ be not rotten before ‘a die” (translation: Depends on how rotten he was when he was alive?!). This scene has nothing to do with the plot or the tragedy; it’s comic relief.  Shakespeare knew that to bring an audience back to the theatre, he had to make them laugh.

While the contextual information that the students chose to include was valuable, it’s the students’ perspectives on the relevance of the plays that I found most compelling – particularly because the assigned plays are so old and often set in worlds that can seem far from our own. For example, the play Snow in Midsummer was written in the 13th century, in the Zaju style of early Chinese drama. Yet one student found clear ways to connect the play’s themes to a modern audience:

The persistence of social injustice and inequality throughout time, from the dynasties of old to our current day, is the reason why Snow in Midsummer remains an important play to read.

Yet another student found ways to connect to the story of The Brothers, a comedy written in the height of the Roman Empire, to today’s issues:

This play is worth reading because it tackles a lot of issues that we still see today, such as class, slavery, family and political power when it comes to those ruling everyone under them. Most importantly, you gain knowledge about what life was like in the Roman Era through the reading of The Brothers.

Over the course of the three semesters that I taught THEA 230 using OER materials, three student pieces were added as Play Introductions and two were included in the OER textbook. Upon identifying a student submission that fully met or exceeded the criteria for the assignment, I asked the student’s permission to include the work in the open textbook. To do this I sent them a permission form that allowed them to indicate the level of access they wanted their work to have. Students were happy to be included. One student even wrote back saying that being included in the textbook was a “huge honor”, a response that aligns with what Allsop et al. (2020) found when analyzing student perceptions of open pedagogy assignments. These students’ works are now a part of the resources available to current THEA 230 students and have been shared outside of Boise State. According to the analytics that Pressbooks provides, in 2023 alone the anthology had 5698 visitors.

Further revisions

The first time I used this assignment students were required to submit all of their work in writing. In subsequent versions, I incorporated principles of Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2018) and invited students to submit their work in writing or as a video/audio recording. While students mostly still completed their work in writing, I did have one or two who took advantage of the opportunity to submit their work in a format of their choosing. Additionally, as I revised other assignments in the course, I expanded the ways for students to share their work with others by including past student work as examples for future cohorts (inspired by the TILT recommendations).

Conclusion

As Wiley and Hilton (2018) noted “when using OER, as opposed to traditionally copyrighted resources, students are free to engage in a broader range of activities and, therefore, to learn in a broader range of ways” (p. 135). What started as a project to integrate OER into my course resulted in the creation of new OER each semester. This transition opened the door for students to authentically apply skills and knowledge gained in THEA 230. Not only did the Play Introduction effectively allow students to demonstrate their learning in the course, but this summative assessment task empowered them to choose topics of interest and articulate why course content mattered. The students whose work now appears in the course materials, and is available to anyone interested in the plays, were honored to have their writing included in the texts. Even more importantly, the switch to OER has increased student success and reduced the number of students who fail the course.

References

Allsop, J., Young, S. J., Nelson, E. J., Piatt, J., & Knapp, D. (2020). Examining the benefits associated with implementing an active learning classroom among undergraduate students. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 32(3), 418-426. https://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE3877.pdf 

CAST. (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines. www.cast.org.  http://udlguidelines.cast.org

Clinton-Lisell, V. (2021). Open pedagogy: A systematic review of empirical findings. Journal of Learning for Development, 8(2), 255-268. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1314199.pdf

DeRosa, R., & Robison, S. (2017). From OER to open pedagogy: Harnessing the power of open. In R.  Jhangiani & R. Biswas-Diener (Eds.), Open: The philosophy and practices that are revolutionizing education and science (pp. 115–124). Ubiquity Press. https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.i 

Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of Open Pedagogy: A Model for Using Open Educational Resources. Educational Technology, 55(4), 3–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44430383

Jon Mueller. (2018) Authentic Assessment Toolbox. https://jonfmueller.com/toolbox/whatisit.htm

Open Educational Quality Initiative. (2011) Beyond OER: Shifting Focus to Open Educational Practices. www.oerknowledgecloud.org/archive/OPAL2011.pdf

Winklemes, M. (2023) “Introduction to Transparency in Learning and Teaching,” Perspectives in Learning 20(1). https://csuepress.columbusstate.edu/pil/vol20/iss1/2

Wiley, D. (2013) What is Open Pedagogy. Improving Learning. https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975

Wiley, D., & Hilton III, J. L. (2018). Defining OER-enabled pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(4). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i4.3601 

Appendix: The Play Introduction Assignment

Description

This assignment will bring together the research, writing and synthesis skills we practice and develop in this course. You will research one of the plays that we discuss in this class and create an introduction for it, with the goal of helping future students understand the context and importance of the plays in this course.

Purpose

This assignment will bring together various aspects of what we have learned during the course, allowing you to demonstrate your achievement of the following outcomes:

LO 1: Identify orally and in writing important movements and events in theatre history and in the history of dramatic literature.

LO 2: Analyze orally and in writing the ways past societies have defined the nature and purpose of theatre.

Task

The typical introduction to a play – either in a written format, or in a lobby display/preview video done by a theatre – helps readers/audience members understand the historical context of the play, learn important things about the playwright and ultimately lead to greater appreciation of reading/watching of the play. To do this type of contextual work (for this assignment and in the future), you will do research about all these facets of one of the plays we read this semester. You will then create a play introduction that provides the reader/audience member (and, potentially, future students of this course) with important historical context and an argument for why the play is relevant (a.k.a., worth reading/seeing). Providing that kind of information can be done in different ways for each play, so there is no “right” or “wrong” version here. I will be looking at what information you have chosen to share with your audience and how clearly you make an argument for why the play is relevant.

The format for your introduction is up to you; you’ve seen three written examples in this course (for Brothers, Snow in Midsummer and Hamlet), but this semester I am giving you the choice to do your introduction in a way that is interesting to you. Perhaps that means you will write it, but it could also mean that you create a lobby display (in the form of a poster), create a video or audio file, a slide presentation, comic book, etc. As long as you meet the criteria for the final product, the form that product takes is up to you.

Because of this potential for variation, and because this is not a formal paper in which you would include multiple citations of sources, the annotated bibliography is especially important to help me understand how you utilized the sources you found. Each annotation should include a summary of what information you found useful in that source and how it affected your understanding of the relevance of the play. For example, a bibliography of the playwright might help you understand what message the writer was trying to convey to their audience and therefore inform your opinion about the relevance of the work.

The Play Introduction, depending on what type of format you create, should be around 300 words or three minutes minimum in length. If you choose to create a PowerPoint, there should be a minimum of five slides. The annotated bibliography will need to be submitted in writing, and should include at least six sources, at least four of which should be peer-reviewed sources/scholarly works. If you have questions about finding sources for this assignment, please reach out to our library contact, or any of the librarians at the Albertsons Library.

Grading

Each of the initial steps of this project (due in Modules 5, 8, 11 and 15) are worth 5 points each (for a total of 20 points).

The final Play Introduction will be worth 21 points and graded using the following rubric:

Historical Context

• One piece of historical context provided (2 points)
• Historical context clear related to the play (2 points)
• Historical context supported by research (includes direct quote/citation in support) (2 points)

Playwright Information

• One piece of information about the playwright is provided (2 points)
• The information about the playwright provides clear support for why the playwright is important in theater history (2 points)
• Playwright information is supported by research (includes direct quote/citation in support) (2 points)

Importance/relevance of the play

• One argument for why the play is important historically/relevant to today’s audience is included (2 points)
• Argument is supported by research (includes direct quote/citation in support) (2 points)

Overall work

• Mostly free of editorial/spoken word/graphical errors (1 point)

Bibliography

• All required sources are included (2 points)
• All sources appropriately listed using MLA format (2 points)

Assignment Steps

This assignment will be due in a series of steps, as we work towards the final submission which is due in Module 16. During each Unit Summary module, you will submit work that is designed to help you do the kind of thinking and writing that is necessary to do well on the final version of the Play Introduction. The specific steps of the assignment are described below, and in the modules in which they are due.

Module 5

Context: Putting a play into historical context is often an important part of an introduction to a play because it helps the audience better prepare for and understand the play they will be reading/seeing. To practice this skill, you will imagine that you have been asked to create an introductory piece for Oedipus or Lysistrata, depending on which play you chose to read in Week Three/what most interests you. Once you have decided on that, answer the following question: what is one piece of historical information you think an audience should have before starting the play? To share your answer to this question, write/record a summary of that information and explain one specific aspect of the play that this information will help the reader understand (Is it the kind of theatre in which it was performed? The religious festival of which it was a part. That the major roles were played by the same three, masked, male actors? The history of the chorus?). Your submission should be directed to me, not to your future audience (you’ll get a chance to do that in your final project!). It should also be free of editorial/verbal/graphic errors and be approximately 200 words or two minutes long.

Module 8

Relevance: Helping an audience understand why a particular play is relevant to the current time/location/audience is also sometimes a topic for an introductory piece. To practice this skill, you will imagine that you are working on a production of one of the two plays we read in this module (you can choose which one). Write a 200-word essay/record a two-minute video/an equivalent length of a slide presentation about why the story/style/themes of the play are relevant to a college student audience. To do this, you may want to bring in some historical information about the original purpose of your chosen style of theatre, or you may choose to focus on the themes/characters in the play to make connections between the original audience and yours. Either way, your submission should include specific references to scenes/lines/ideas from the play to support your argument.

Module 11

Research: By this point in the semester, you should choose which play you would formally like to work on for this assignment.  For the final submission, you will also need to include an annotated bibliography. The purpose of this assignment is to get you started on your research and allow me to give you feedback on your approach prior to submitting your final project. For this assignment, you will submit an annotated bibliography, in MLA format, that includes at least four potential sources for your research. Typically (and for your final submission) the annotations should include how the information in that source was used in/useful for your final creation. In this case, your annotations can include your thoughts about how you think the source will be useful, if you have not yet had a chance to thoroughly review it. Since your final annotated bibliography should be in writing (whether at the end of your paper or your video/audio/PowerPoint) this submission should be done in writing.

Module 15

Outline: For this last step before submitting your finished Play Introduction, you will submit an outline for what you plan to create. The outline should include a summary of the main ideas you plan to include in your introduction as well as the format of your project.  By summary, I mean that you should have at least 3 clear, complete sentences summarizing the information in/direction of each paragraph/scene/slide of your piece. I will give you feedback on this assignment as soon as possible so that you have time to integrate my feedback before submitting your final Play Introduction. Note: You should just submit the outline, not a full draft of the Play Introduction, as I will not be able to give feedback to everyone at that depth before the final due date. You can submit the outline in written or verbal format.