I had to lead this topic and I wasn’t ready but the more I read the literature and researched, it became easier to grasp. My job was to lead the group discussions and try to get everyone involved, everyone had their own views and perspectives but the most prevalent view that we agreed on was how much information is valuable and the importance of sharing but also taking into consideration that not all educational institutions may view openness as a positive, we found that we our institutions is that sharing is encouraged but within limits as at the end of the day education is a business.
Openness can be defined as a lack of restriction or accessibility, openness is about being generous with information. Sharing and openness reduces the gap between different strata of society and between countries , improves the quality of education, accelerates the knowledge flow and increases the number of people involved in the educational process(mostly informal and lifelong). In the educational sense openness refers to making sure that teaching materials are freely shared and are accessible at anytime. Open learning is a learning method for the knowledge acquisition based on open educational resources, open source technologies and online communities. Open learning aims to allow pupils self-determined, independent and interest-guided learning. When sharing it is advisable to also be aware of Creative Commons licenses, the Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. These tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work (Creative commons 2019).A key element to the prosperity of openness is stressing the importance of licensing that permits free use and re-purposing.
Open educational practice and resources
Open educational practice is the use of Open educational resources for teaching and learning in order to innovate the learning process. They are represented in teaching techniques that draw upon open technologies and high-quality open educational resources in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. According to Chiappea and Adameb (2018:213) integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has influenced educational policies and practices globally through institutional to classroom levels and is now a structural feature of most forms of formal education in the 21st century.Open education resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (Weller:2014:72). Open educational practices broaden learning from a focus on access to knowledge to a focus on access to knowledge creation. In learning environments that adopt OEP, for example, students and faculty can collaborate on building and remixing openly licensed course materials in ways that facilitate engaged learning and the development of new course content that contributes to knowledge in a given field.Below are some of the motivations for the creation and development of OER’s:
• building reputation of individuals or institutions or communities
• improving efficiency, cost and quality of production
• opening access to knowledge
• enhancing pedagogy and the students’ learning experience
• building technological momentum
• radically reduce costs
• deliver greater learning efficiency
• promote continuous improvement of instruction and personalized learning
• encourage translation and localization of content
• offer equal access to knowledge for all
The impact of online learning on the campus experience
Although there might be an increasing number of online courses available, there are also a lot of people that prefer having their learning in a controlled formal environment in a lecture hall with a professor in front of them (face-to-face). Online education is very innovative and allows online students to get their work done at their own pace but that might also be the downfall as that requires a great deal of self direction and discipline. It is no secret that courses are widely available online and on different fields of study but the question is whether is it accredited or if the quality is up to par. According to Bawa (2016) online courses have a 10% to 20% higher failed retention rate than traditional classroom environments. In Total, 40% to 80% online students dropout of online classes.
References:
Bates, T. (2019). Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning. (2nd edition)
Bawa, P. (2016) ‘Retention in Online Courses: Exploring Issues and Solutions—A Literature Review’, SAGE Open. doi: 10.1177/2158244015621777.
Chiappea, A and Adameb, S,I. 2018. Open Educational Practices: a learning way beyond free access knowledge. Ensaio: aval. pol. públ. Educ., Rio de Janeiro, v.26, n. 98, p. 213-230, Available at: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-40362018000100213 [Accessed:21 October 2019]
Creative commons. 2019. License design and rationale. Available at:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013). Digital resilience in higher education. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 16(1), 53.
Weller, M. (2014) The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bam
