Photo: JesusLeal, Pixabay

During the last two weeks, we took a look to open learning and sharing through great webinars and discussions. At the moment, open sharing is a thing in Finland too as the Library of Open Educational Resources has been opened. That is developed by the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Finnish National Agency for Education, and its development is coordinated by CSC – IT Center for Science. Of course, it is not the first effort for transparency or openness in education but maybe the most coordinated at the moment. At least it is a national and hence maybe stronger way to contribute to the goal. I still don’t see it as a primary publishing channel for my own content for some reason.

I’m not in the teaching position in my organisation at the moment but I work as a Senior Adviser which is considered as “the other personnel”, so to say. I do have teacher qualifications and due to my educational technology expertise, I teach in one course this year in teacher education. When I planned the material I was about to use in the course, it was obvious it should be accessible to students also after the course. That’s why I built the part of it on MS Sway and shared it with a visitor link to students. In a meeting, we didn’t actually use the material a lot but we collaborated in Mural around the concept of educational technology. In a small group discussion, students built the map with a lotus blossom technique and then we had great discussions around the theme together. With no exception, all the content I had planned to show to students in my presentation, was covered during the discussion. This made me realise that it is not compulsory to have presentation material for meetings but perhaps something to share afterwards to support remembrance. 

There is still a lot of discussion about what kind of rights there are for teachers who create e.g e-learning material. And so there should be, of course. It has to be one’s own decision whether to share their material with others or not. Still, in some sense, it is funny if teachers who aim to teach things to people, try to keep their material hidden from others. Is it then about doing material to show it to somebody or to teach somebody? If the latter, why wouldn’t it be open for everybody to learn? What would a teacher lose if they let everybody benefit from their great expertise?