The research’s objective was to design and implement a student proactive open pedagogy that would enable students to find and use (open) learning materials needed to explore and apply a self-chosen ICT technology. The course’s open pedagogy was designed using the idea of open practice (Ouwehand & Schuwer, 2017) and the ambition of giving students control over their study, based on insights from studies on intrinsic motivation, like the flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi et al. 2005) and Self Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2002; 2008). The student proactive open pedagogy resulted in a total of 51 self-chosen different ICT technologies being studied and used to create individual applications for which the students found and used over 450 educational resources. These resources were analyzed on (a) descriptive characteristics, (b) educational fit and (c) reputation and (student) evaluation. The analysis was used to reflect on important findings from the OER literature such as Wiley’s 5R, the Wiley Paradox and educational fit. Results of the reflection were evaluated with six of the participating students during semi-structured interviews, leading to the following conclusions. The study brought interesting insights in relationship to the OER literature and classical OER challenges. Due to the fact that in an open student proactive pedagogy the learning content is ‘created’ by the student and from a student’s perspective some of the pitfalls, downsides, conditions and problems described in OER literature still apply but no longer obstruct the pedagogy and are successfully bypassed as a result of the pro-activeness of the students. Therefore the open student pro-active pedagogy should focus on the student’s pro-activeness, the ability to analyze and describe his/her knowledge needs and matching available resources. In other words, a successful open proactive pedagogy largely relies on the development of 21st century skills and not on formal OER requirements and deficits.
