The natural inclination for most teachers, particularly in an assessment saturated era, is to design assignments that clearly and cleanly map onto outcomes. This is, of course, tied at least in part to the corporate university model (see Bill Reading’s University in Ruins), where learning is situated as a commodity and is validated via efficiency measures, but it also linked to several principles where teaching is positioned as a practice of identify key/critical outcomes and creating targeted activities that lead to those outcomes. In all fairness, this model has value in many arenas and does, in fact, work relatively well in pedagogical orientations where assessment is the pinnacle value (i.e., those structures where validating learning and funding and practice are determined by testing results and assessment more so than the immersion in the learning process, development that comes from creative engagement, and value of crafting meaningful experiences rather than measurable efficiencies). But one thing that comes up time and again that tends to push back against the corporate university expectations and these one-to-one instructional models is that learning is not a commodity, and even when it is, it is anything but efficient. In fact, some of the best learning we encounter is messy, unpredictable, and increasingly rooted in the personal (personal identities, personal investments, etc.). And we can use these considerations as the very grounds for bringing the digital into the classroom—finding ways not to direct, in precise terms, the kinds of things students make, but rather creating an opportunity in which students discover, determine, and design their own engagements. This kind of orientation tends to get label as open-ended or open assignment practice and is almost always linked to project based work. And while there are a number of ways of bringing this approach to bear on a class, I want to offer just a couple touchstones that might help those new to this practice begin to find a way into this approach.

The basic orientation is as such: the instructor provides the inventive framework for the project (goals, parameters, obstructions, etc.), while students identify their own exigencies and create projects in relation to that tension, focus, interest, argument, and the like. As part of this orientation, each project (and approach) contributes to the design and delivery of the work, but they must be created and intended for digital distribution and, when completed, should include or be accompanied by a reflective element (or statement of learning) on the part of the student.

As the instructor, our task is not merely to turn students loose, but rather to create the inventive framework that invites students into a meaningful engagement. That is, we don’t just ask them to go make a video about a local restaurant; rather, we invite them to think about creating a project or series of media elements that critically and creatively engage food culture. We then provide obstacles or rules for the completion of that work: e.g., the project must touch on the local food culture in some meaningful capacity, must be constructed for digital distribution (i.e., it should not work, in total, in printed form), and must utilize at least 7 appropriate (and credible) resources. The goal here is to design a challenge, not an assignment, and then to allow the students to work creatively within that framework. The less obstructions or guides an instructor offers, the harder it is for students to get started and figure out what is expected of them, but the more widely the project types and depth will vary. But having too many obstructions can pin the projects down in very restrictive ways, undermining the very open-ended nature of the assignment. Thus, I try to operate right around 5 obstructions, typically providing the following: project/concept frame, distribution/delivery requirement, research/source engagement & expectations, due dates, and reflective statement.

• The project frame introduces the challenge and its relation to the course (as well as gesturing toward some potential avenues of exploration and sharing some mentor texts for students to look at – and for the latter I often turn to examples a TheJUMP+).
• The distribution/delivery requirement details my media expectations and how I want the project turned in (more or less); this typically includes some statement about being constructed and shared through digital means, and/or a statement about visual media, hyperlinking practices, and the role of the aesthetic in constructing meaning for digital works.
• The research/source engagement & expectations is designed to help students implement the works and words of others. IT is, at its core, a reflection of traditional research practice. But I tend to frame the matter in relation to appropriate resources, as these are not always academic and/or it invites conversations about digital field methods and/or other modes of research and idea development.
• The due dates section is typically more than just a calendar of when things are due. Rather, it is meant to help them identify their own timelines and workflows and, just as importantly, to situate their projects as being oriented around stages and designating points in those stages for intervention and feedback (peer, instructor, or otherwise). The latter is, perhaps, one of the more overlooked stages of all digital literacy/digital creativity work, for what matters in most cases is the feedback loops and the way they allow us to engage with a student in process. That is, one of major arguments is that what matters in a class is not my expertise in a given technology, but rather my content expertise (i.e., the ways of knowing and representing that knowing central to my field of study), and one of the best ways to give students access to that part of my identity is through discussing their projects with them, talking about how they work or don’t work for an audience connected to the course’s area of study, and helping them think about alternate ways of achieving the same ends—not technology specific, but project specific. The truth is that instructors often shortchange the very expertise they bring to a class—situating their value as a course designer and discussion leader. But intervening into student work, providing meaningful (and situated) feedback, and talking with students and working through their thinking and ideas, is often far more important than a course plan or lecture or syllabus.
• On nearly every project I assign, I ask students to provide a reflection or statement of learning in which they talk about the project, about their choices in the project, and about what they believe they have learned. I list it here because I typically include it as one of the required elements of the project, but I will more adequately detail below in its own section.

One additional note: in this approach the onus of learning a given technology or platform falls to the students. The reason is that there is no one-size-fits-all technological component here and so the instructor (and/or the obstructions) cannot possible account for the full range of approaches: video, audio, image building, web design, and the like. Thus, the focus here from the instructor standpoint is (a) helping students with content development and the ways in which they are representing/expressing that content and (b) helping students to identifying resources on campus and online that might help them develop the requisite technological skills.

In this open-ended approach, a lot of the design and decision work falls squarely on the students. It is not just a matter of asking students to produce (or reproduce) a given course content, nor even to apply (in clearly delineated ways) a set of course concepts, structures, methods, and the like, but rather to generate a project that not only allows them to meaningful work through or in relation to course content but that also is of interest and value to them. Additionally, it is up to them to learn the necessary skills to produce what they have in mind. It is, to be sure, a multipart challenge for students, but tends to be one in which they develop a vested interest.

To help them along, I have students do a series of inventive activities to come up with ideas and, routinely, I ask them to meet in pairs or groups to share their ideas and to get feedback. I tend to situate this as fast-failure engagement (working through the bad ideas quickly to identify the stickiness of the good ideas), but I also foreground the conversation (and the attempt to their ideas into words) as being critical to refining their project and their own understanding. In terms of the design work, I have them imagine an ideal representation of their work and to describe it or storyboard out the basic elements. As part of this, I again engage them in conversation and put them in groups to talk about the vision as well as to develop strategies for achieving that goal—including identifying the requisite technologies. Then, as a last developmental element, I have them spend 15 minutes at the end of a couple of classes identifying resources that can help them develop the requisite technological skills (with them creating a shared document of links, descriptions, skill-share dates, and the like.). Again, the work here falls on the students, but I create opportunities during class time (or as out-of-class activities) in which they can work together to help make their own efforts more effective

Instructors can create all manner of open-ended assignments, but one way to ensure that those assignments involve digital literacy or digital creativity is to make them purposely built for a digital audience. Here I am referring not only to the digital search engines and algorithms that sift, sort, and sequence different networked artifacts, but specifically those people who are likely only to encounter this project online or via some related digital means. This, to me, is key as it invites students to think about the digital as native to the project’s creation. Anne Friedberg refers to this as project’s being “born digital,” which can have a notable impact on the idea development itself (see "On Digital Scholarship"). That is, if instructors have students start by writing a paper and then shifting that over to a digital format, what results, in most cases, is a kind of gloried version of a Microsoft Word document. But if instructors situate this digital condition as the starting point, the possibilities seem to shift, and students focus more on the kinds of media they have encountered and enjoyed online and then they use this as an orientation to their own ideas, rather than treating the digital as translation of text.

To this end, what I tell students is to look at some critical examples online that have left an impact on them. And to help with this I also provide some examples from TheJUMP+, The New York Times, and other venues that I think might resonate with them. Then we talk about those projects and what makes them work or meaningful for the students. And then from here I have them begin their work, with the digital mode of deliver and the various artifacts they encounter fresh in their minds

In nearly every project, I require students to include some form of reflective statement. As part of this statement, I also typically ask students to do a self-evaluation of their own work. Essentially, what I want them to do (in reflection or evaluation) is to provide something of a bit of context for the work. That is, with each project in this open-ended orientation sprawling in its own unique direction, there needs to be avenues by which the work can be situated it in relation to course content and practice. Thus, with these reflection statements, I invite students to provide that insight and/or make connections between their work and the course. What this does, among other things, is to help me better understand the students’ works (and specifically how they see those creations and/or how they value [validate] them). But the reflection also allows students to think specifically about the experience and to put their own learning into words. This component helps students learn to meaningful translate their work or experiences in such a way as to render accessible to others.

To help students with this reflection, the key strategy I have been employing over the past few years has been to ask them at regular intervals during the project to identify evidence or to describe (in recorded form) key experiences that demonstrate their learning. In most projects I do this informally, trusting them to keep their own records and whatnot, but I have on occasion included this as a required project elements or even as a task that has course points associated with it. But in either case, formal or informal, the strategic advantage of asking for evidence and descriptions of experiences rather than just having them reflect on it internally has been that it grounds their own approaches to learning (and thinking about the project) in tangible—often fundamentally material—ways. This has been perhaps the single most impacting addition to the reflection work in my courses over the past eight years and has, in most cases, led to more insightful reflections on the part of students.

justinhodgson.com | @postdigitalJH | JH@LinkedIn