Reuse & Remix of Student Assignments

An idea occurred to me yesterday and I tweeted it. I woke up this morning and found more than 300 likes on my tweets, and lots of really cool replies with ideas how to take it forward and its benefits.

The basic idea is, why do we constantly tell students they cannot repurpose previous assignments in other courses if it can be used in our courses? It doesn’t make sense. I cite myself in my writing, I repurpose my slides for different presentations, c’mon. It’s like telling students basically that what they’ve done before has no use, has no meaning. This goes beyond creating renewable assignments that have purpose outside your class. This is a remix/repurpose assignment where they choose to bring something they have done before and build from it.

It suddenly occurred to me that if we are constantly discouraging students from "reusing" research/papers they did in other courses, we are reinforcing the notion that previous work they did in uni is irrelevant/useless. I am now suddenly considering doing something different 1/2

— ℳąhą Bąℓi, PhD مها بالي 🌵 (@Bali_Maha) October 30, 2020

It suddenly occurred to me that if we are constantly discouraging students from "reusing" research/papers they did in other courses, we are reinforcing the notion that previous work they did in uni is irrelevant/useless. I am now suddenly considering doing something different 1/2

— ℳąhą Bąℓi, PhD مها بالي 🌵 (@Bali_Maha) October 30, 2020

You can follow the threads on Twitter and see the quoted tweets (there are many) to read… but I have screenshotted a few here (sorry these won’t be accessible to folks using screenreaders, but you can go directly to Twitter to find them in text). I did put commentary in the captions, though. Hope it helps.