Topic 2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.
William Blake, circa 1793
Before starting to work on this topic I thought open education boils down to opening access to courses (i.e., making courses available to everyone, not just students at one’s institution). My main association with open education were MOOCs as I had some experience being one of the moderators of a MOOC at my institution. The course was built around a topic taught by a professor emeritus who is one of the most esteemed academics in that field. Naturally, his personal brand attracted many participants. On the one side, it was quite interesting because I could see very different perspectives from people from very different walks of life all being interested in the same topic. On the other side, because the participants were so heterogeneous, I found it difficult to reply to comments as I sometimes downright did not understand what the participants meant. For example, some participants were working in niche industries and tried to relate the content to what they were doing, but it was difficult to grasp what that was. My conclusion after this experience was that MOOCs should be left for either professor of institutions with strong brands. Furthermore, I never thought that I can or that I should open any of my courses or education materials.
While working on Topic 2 of the ONL course, I become aware of open education resources (OERs) and the different ways in which a course or a part of a course could be open. I had some superficial knowledge about Creative Commons, but I never thought that a course could be opened under such a license. Our team’s deliverable for this topic was a mind map co-created on Coggle (you can check it out here) which I think provides a nice overview of some of the most important things to be considered. While I am now much more aware of the benefits and challenges of opening up courses, I am not sure if I am ready to open up my own content quite yet. My main concern stems from the fact that I use a lot of copy-righted materials in my lectures and while I provide the sources on my slides, I am afraid it would not be possible to open my slides and lectures since that material was not released under a CC license. An option would be to try and replace that content with (more) CC-licensed content, but I am not sure I would be able to cover everything I want to cover in the same way. I am already using quite a lot of open materials in my course (e.g., online videos) so in the long run it might be the way to go. Nevertheless, I would also have to check what my institution’s policy about opening up courses. I am sure that after the events of this spring many business schools will have to reconsider their online learning (and hopefully opening up) policy.
On a side note, one of the activities I enjoy in my spare time is creating music playlists. When I was in mid-school, I did that on audio cassettes, in high school I upgraded to CDs and MP3s and in my 20’s everything moved online from 8tracks to YouTube and nowadays Spotify (you can check some out here if you are interested). When we were first discussing the topic of opening up on the course Padlet I raised my concern about losing one’s competitive advantage as a teacher after opening everything up. Now I understand a bit better that maybe my real competitive-advantage is being a curator rather than a creator of education material. I did not create the music I add to my playlists, and nowadays Spotify ensures that (at least to some extent) the authors are credited and remunerated. Maybe that’s the future of education as well…
