Since 2023-24, we develop a teaching innovation project to promote students’ active participation and engagement through the design and development of renewable assignments in various distance education courses we teach at the Faculty of Education at the University XXXXX. As open educational practices (OEP) that include active participation and production of knowledge by students (Paskevicius, 2017), `renewable´ assignments are ‘assignments which both support an individual student's learning and result in new or improved OER that provide a lasting benefit to the broader community of learners’ (Wiley & Hilton, 2018), so students’ contributions produce relevant content that has value beyond the student’s own learning (Wiley, 2013).

In 2023-24, our first experience with this type of innovative assignments and assessment methods involved the creation of a collaborative online map about community development projects (Gil-Jaurena et al., 2024) in an undergraduate online course, and it showed this task’s potential for engaging students as producers and for enriching the course content. In 2024-2025, we converted our traditional or disposable assignments into renewable ones in various distance education undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Specifically, we explored peer assessment in a master course, collaborative glossaries produced by the students in two master courses, and collaborative online maps in an undergraduate course and two master courses. The impact of these experiences in terms of students' engagement and academic achievement, collected via surveys, was positive (Gil-Jaurena, Domínguez, et al., 2025; Gil-Jaurena, López Ronda et al., 2025).

In 2025-26, we have further explored the implementation of these renewable assignments, including the use of students produced collaborative maps in other courses or with other cohorts of the same course. Also, we have incorporated a set of questions about generative AI in the students’ perceptions survey, under the assumption that this type of assignments –which facilitate collaborative learning in distance education environments, students’ engagement and public sharing– can promote a more ethical use of AI as a support tool and prevent its misuse as a replacement tool. In the presentation, we will share our findings and reflections about the use of renewable assignments in times of AI.