1. Open Pedagogy:
Teaching with
WordPress & the
Laurie Hurson
Teaching and Learning Center
The Graduate Center ,CUNY
NYCDH Week 2019
Slides were created by Laurie Hurson and Krystyna Michael and are licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License

2. Workshop Overview
Slides
http://bit.ly/nycdh_open
1. Defining Open
2. Teaching with WordPress
3. Open Digital Pedagogy
4. Exploring Course Models
5. Building a Course Site
6. Open Digital Tools
7. Considerations

3. “Open”
● What do we we mean by “open”?
● Have you used any open teaching methods in the past?
● What are different ways to make a class “open”?
● Why open teaching? Benefits and challenges of openness?
● What do you most want to discuss about “open teaching”?

4. “Open”● Accessible, to read, to understand to copy (open source)
● Free
● Cultural change - different use of materials
● New ways to get information
● sharing,remixable
● Locally relevant, collaborative creation, grassroots development
● Open code, open documentation
● Disruptive, resistant, incorporates new voices

5. TEACHING PLATFORMS
→ What platforms
do you use in
your teaching?

6. Why teach with or ?
→ Open source web framework
→ Customization & Flexibility (Themes)
→ Free and open software add-ons (Plugins)
→ Shared creation/production, peer-to-peer connections
→ Public visibility options, audience consideration
→ Develop Digital Literacy
→ Exploration of new pedagogies

7. OPEN DIGITAL PEDAGOGY (“ODP”)
“Use of cost-free, publicly available online tools and platforms by
instructors and students for teaching, learning, and communicating in
support of educational goals“ (Rosen & Smale, 2015; Hybrid Pedagogy)
→ Free/Libre: Free beer vs. free speech
→ Open-source web platforms
→ Free digital tools
→ OER: Open Educational Resources

8. OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
“any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or
introduced with an open license… anyone can legally and freely copy, use,
adapt and re-share them.”(UNESCO)
OER can be:
→ Textbooks, literature in public domain, primary sources
→ Podcasts and audio recordings
→ Videos and images
→ Assignments, lesson plans, course modules, syllabi
→ Digital tools, platforms

9. OER EXAMPLES
SmartHistory: engaging videos and essays that cover all eras of art history, ranging
from the paleolithic to the present
ScienceForward: videos and resources that introduce science as way of exploring the
world; focuses on the critical thinking skills in use across the scientific disciplines
Art History Teaching Resources: online repository of art history teaching content
Equality Archive: multimodal archive with entries focused on the history of sex and
gender equality in the United States
The American Yawp: crowd-sourced US History Textbook
→ More @ teachOER.org

10. CREATIVE COMMONS
Enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision
of free legal tools
“Licenses are legal tools that creators and other rights holders can use to offer
certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights”
→ Best known for CC Licenses that
determine how digital work can be
used, shared, edited, etc.

11. .com
● Wordpress-hosted
● Freemium model
● WP-provided themes
● No plugins
● WP Terms of service
● site.wordpress.com
●
.org
● “Self”-hosted
● Free & Open
● WP & custom themes
● Plugins enhance site
● Institutional Affiliation
● site.hostname.edu

12. .com .org

13. .com .org

14. CUNY Academic
Commons
&

15. “Courses” Tab
→ Course models on
the CUNY Academic
Commons

16. OPEN TEACHING MODELS
Technologies of Reading
● Online discussion through blogs and commenting, Commonplace
books as multimodal composition, Projects utilize other open tools
Music Since 1945
● Private listening assignments, public ‘collaborative’ blog, event
attendance as experiential learning
Principles of New Media
● Private site with entirely open content course materials (OER),
students have the option to create public-facing final projects
Slides: http://bit.ly/nycdh_open

27. Go through models

28. Open Teaching Techniques
● Developing weekly deliverables in digital spaces
● Scaffolding assignments and digital skills and literacies
● Offering private + public spaces for work and reflection
● Choosing responsive + accessible technologies
● Creating multimodal, media-integrated assignments
● Using digital tools to expand learning opportunities
● Bridging course content with public events to foster experiential learning

29. Building a Site
• Dashboard: “the backend” for editing
• Site Visibility: Privacy settings
• Posts and Pages: adding content
• Creating Links
• Uploading and adding pictures and media
• Posts: Categories, Tags
• Pages: Static homepage
• Disabling Comments
• Appearance
• Menus: Site Architecture
• Widgets: Sidebars
• Themes: Site Design
• Plugins: Adding Tools and Functionality

30. TO DO List: Site Content Creation
1. View the “front end” of your site
2. Navigate to the “back end” of your site AKA Dashboard
3. Edit your site visibility in Settings > Reading
4. Add a Page called “Home” for static welcome content
5. Add another Page for static content (I.e. syllabus, grading information)
6. Add a Page called “Blog” (I’ll explain later… in #10)
7. Add a few Posts for dynamic, updating content
a. Add media and Hyperlinks to a post
8. Add categories for your posts in Posts>Categories
9. Go back to your list Posts and “bulk edit” to categorize them
10. In Settings > Reading Set up a static “Home” Page and re-route Posts to the
“Blog”

31. TO DO List: Site Design and Customization
1. Now that you have some content, create a custom menu in
Appearance>Menus. “Manage Location” to set the menu in place.
2. Try out a few themes in Appearance >Themes
3. Depending on your theme: Add a custom header or featured images by
uploading openly-licensed media. Themes will often suggest the size for
header images in Appearance > Customize > Header
4. Once you decide on a theme, add content and information to the sidebar
areas in Appearance>Widgets
5. What other functionality is possible? Peruse Plugins to determine if you
want to add any other tools to your site. Don’t go too crazy activating
Plugins. Activate one or two, see if you need it and, deactivate as needed

32. Open digital tools
1. Timeline JS (knightLab)
2. StoryMaps JS
3. Hypothesis for social annotation
4. Manifold for open texts

33. Timeline JS

34. Timeline JS

36. A Conversation in the Margins!

37. English Students annotating Bartleby.com
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg

38. Manifold
• Intuitive, Collaborative, open source web platform for
scholarly publishing
• Allows you to:
– Publish dynamic course editions of texts in the public domain
– Include supplementary notes, videos, or other resources
– Annotate texts collaboratively

40. Creating an Annotation

41. Threaded Annotations
Paul Hebert’s class version of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

42. Open Teaching Techniques
● Developing weekly deliverables in digital spaces
● Scaffolding assignments and digital skills and literacies
● Offering private + public spaces for work and reflection
● Choosing responsive + accessible technologies
● Creating multimodal, media-integrated assignments
● Using digital tools to expand learning opportunities
● Bridging course content with public events to foster experiential learning

43. Considerations
● Log in
○ Do students need to make an account?
● Learning curve
○ How difficult is it to get the hang of using this tool? Does it
require knowledge of other platforms?
● Relationship to content
○
● Affordances
○ Is this tool more likely to foster engagement or distract or
confuse students?
● Accessibility
○ Can students access this tool on their phones? Is it accessible
for students using screen readers?

44. Contact Information
Laurie Hurson, GC TLC: lhurson@gc.cuny.edu
Commons HELP: https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu
WordPress Codex: codex.wordpress.org