I found it very interesting to have the PBL group discussions on open learning both in terms of our cultural and social backgrounds and what will happen after the pandemic.
After reading some of the blogposts written by other participants in this ONL212-course I realize that we all have different understanding and use of open learning. The interpretation of open as free might not bee true in all cases. For instance Catherine Cronin explained in a figure the idea of the difference between Open admission (as in free) and open educational resources (as in reuse through open licenses). I guess the first approach is more like free online material (youtube/Ted Talks) for anyone to assimilate or a MOOC while the other perspective relate more to the educators view on how reuse others material and adapt in a course.
We had a discussion in our PBL-group about OER and the view of incorporating others material in your course, sometimes I feel that the ”investments” the students do when they buy a book motivates them to read and also value the quality as higher in relation to a free online article. My students indicate that a guest lecture is of high value/a great activity to include in a course. But I have feeling that including an another teachers pre-recorded lecture/material would be perceived as laziness.
In relation to the question of openness/open education I believe that we need to share a common understanding with the students on what quality is as well as the idea of higher education. They can’t expect to have everything ”served” it is also about critical thinking, in my courses I like to include open-ended problems in order to challenge the students to apply high-order thinking skills (Krathwohl, 2002).
This topic is not so easy, in our PBL-group we talked about accessibility and availability, UNESCO Recommendations described actions that should support not the idea of create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute. That approach have been questioned by for instance David Wiley that claim that;” The UNESCO definition of OER requires something impossible – a copyright license that grants permission to engage in an activity that isn’t regulated by copyright law.” Also in our discussions we reflected on the situation in terms of lack of relevant infrastructure, for instance in developing countries, but there exist initiatives to support that (OER Africa), but to claim that open is free is not true in such environment.
Harvard professor Eric Mazur stress the importance of higher-order thinking skills and that many students study for the test and most tests are constructed so that they assess low-level thinking skills. Mazur claim that we do not need ‘thinking machines’. So what has this to do with open learning. My point was that even if we as instructors/teacher benefits from having access to open education resources that will not in all cases increase the learning of the students. We still need to design the activities to fit the purpose. No matter what material or resources we include in a course, we need to support the students how to use the material (no matter if we develop the material or use OER), and how we do that will be different from course to course/time to time/between different activities but also depending on the background of students. Contextualize the material is maybe what I’m searching for here, something that we can’t skip just because we introduce OER, so the time to develop a course might decrease but the work needs to be done if we want to keep the material updated and the quality linked to learning outcomes and objectives.
References:
Open Education, Open Questions
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/10/open-education-open-questions
OER Africa
https://www.oerafrica.org/
UNESCO: Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER)
https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies/oer/recommendation
Actually, the UNESCO Recommendation Makes Most OER Impossible
https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/6397
Krathwohl, D.R. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: an overview. Theory into practice, 41(4).
