Open_Learning

Openness somehow depends on personal characteristics. But, it can be improved time by time, particularly during this #COVID-19 outbreak. We need to trust and share with each other the available data, information and knowledge. During this topic, we brainstormed the ideas circling around the Fish scenario. I summarized some of thoughts as below:

Amin’s contribution – list of things discussed in summary: safety and security of data shared, need for more open sources, structure and design to offer open source, regulation and ethical issue, cost of materials and funding, convenience and access to opensource, open access for publication, time involved to find open sources.

In fact, one issue about the openness is the safety and security of data shared with peers and some members at external level. There are pros and cons for the openness. From one side, the security, privacy, and ethical concerns. On the other side, there is matter of funding for the material provision. The easy access to materials and scale of coverage could be enormous when we share data with other digitally. So even poor people in developing countries can have access to such information, it could be the course material for example. Our debate pros versus cons of openness lasts for an hour with almost equal arguments for each group of red and yellow.

My personal view, openness can help researchers and students to various valuable information and data. For example, for our subject, we need a lot of information based on secondary data published by the established humanitarian aid organizations. I appreciate that always we have easy access to open published reports written by such organizations such as UN agencies, International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs). Here you can have access to such as reports via this link for example: Reliefweb

Apart from that, I always recommend and willing to share new ebooks, articles and references with my student through email, Teams and many other tools. This is the way to communicate with our student in a better way. However, visiblity is very important before knowledge sharing, and this is the key to improve the coordination. We need to know to whom , we share such valuable resources. Herewith, I and my colleague, Ala from Chalmers University, published an article related to supply chain visbility and coordination in humnaitarian relief setting. That might be applicable to teaching as well. The link to the article

Herewith, there are more references for further reading for this topic:

Chow, C., Deng, J., and Ho, J. (2000), “The openness of knowledge sharing wihin organizaions: A comprative study of the US and China, Journal of Management Accounting Research, 12(1), 65-95

Cronin, C. (2017), “Oppeness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education”, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning