In 2020, I was part of a research team that worked with an Endocrinology course to put structured renewable assignments in place in the course. We gathered detailed feedback in surveys and focus groups from students. Here are a few highlights from our forthcoming study on what students and teachers say are most effective in Structured Renewable Assignment designs:

Get the size right, and encourage deep dives

Students really liked the opportunity to make sure a section of the text was right. They liked a chance to focus on a particular concept. They would prefer to return to a section or concept a few times across a course to make sure they really made a segment of open text as good as possible, over having minor, more passing contributions. They liked the idea of spending several weeks refining a chapter through different types of assignments.

Connect across the course

While students liked the opportunity for deep dives, they showed remarkable metacognition (thinking about their thinking) as they talked about wanting to know the subject in breadth. They asked for more assignments like glossaries, co-constructed learning objectives, and working to organize the table of contents of the course. These assignments would allow them to ‘come up’ from their deep dives and get a good look at the breadth and connections across the course. Coming back to the same chapter or re-revising the same section later in the course, integrating new knowledge, was also a popular idea.

Where you can, make it easy

Learning is hard. Learning while contributing to open knowledge, while maybe no harder, and far more engaging, doesn’t need to be any harder than it is. Small things, like outdated formats for peer review, difficult-to-use editing tools, arbitrary rules for submissions, or just a confusing, hard-to-navigate LMS homepage, can make it difficult for students to maximize their contribution.

Learning sciences agrees  – multiple studies, like Mayer’s on extraneous cognition (2017), have shown that asking students to work hard to figure out things (like LMS organization, or difficult-to-use editing tools) that aren’t core to the concepts of the subject matter, interfere with student learning.