A case study of multi-institutional contributing-student pedagogy

Abstract

Traditionally, learning resources are created by an instructor and distributed to their students. A contributing-student pedagogy (CSP) is one in which this responsibility shifts, placing students in control of creating the resources and sharing them with their peers. Technology plays a central role in supporting the collection and distribution of student-generated resources. Although many CSP tools have the potential to be widely adopted, they have predominantly been applied in a local context and rarely extended to other contexts or institutions. Moreover, the use of CSP (i.e. students contributing to the learning of others) is almost never seen in cross-institutional contexts. In this article, we discuss the novel application of CSP across multiple institutions and countries, reporting on an activity in which first-year programming students in New Zealand generate learning resources for their counterparts in Canada. With the increasing adoption of Web 2.0 tools in education, such cross-institutional learning activities have the potential to become more widespread and we report here on our challenges and successes. We find that a cross-institutional approach can work as well as within-institution CSP, with students at both institutions preferring their contributions to be shared more widely.