The last
two weeks have been about openness in education. My first thoughts on this
topic was that this is something that I don’t work a lot with, and also that I don’t
really have any intention of doing so. However, when we have discussed this
topic and I have read more about it I believe that there are so many different
aspects of open education, so in some aspects I believe that I really use an
open pedagogy. I watched a TEDx talk by David Wiley (2010) and his view was
that education is by definition open, because it is about sharing. We share our
knowledge with our students, and they share work and experiences with us. So if education is open by
definition, then it seems even more important to be specific on what aspect of
openness we are talking about.
I believe
that one important aspect of open education is accessibility, and in that sense MOOCs have an important role. On
the site Classcentral, which gathers MOOCs, I found an article discussing the
digital ivy league (MIT and University of Pennsylvania among others) (Lequerica,
2016). The article, which is a few years’ old, listed how many millions of
enrollment these institutions have. As I understand it, the completion rate of
these online courses is low, but nevertheless, these numbers of enrollment show
the point of accessibility in open education. Education that historically only
has been accessible for a small number of students (with good grades and
possibility to pay tuition fees), is now open to millions of students. Not all
of them may be interested in completing the course, but just grasping a little
on the surface, and that is perfectly fine. It is about the possibility of
taking part in education!
Kay Oddone
(2019) writes about open pedagogies on her blog, and part of what comes out of
that for me is that openness is about activating your students in their
learning. Then for me, openness doesn’t have to imply that students have to
create work to share with the rest of the world through tools like Wikipedia,
blogs, twitter etc., but can also be that students share their work with fellow
students in the same course. Of course this may not be open to the same degree,
but sometimes that is enough. If we don’t want our students to just be
consumers, but creators, it is through the creation that they learn, and
therefore students that will come next year also need to create and not just
consume what others did before them. I am not saying that I don’t believe in
openness, I very much do, but as my fellow group member in this course, Jan,
puts it, we need to pose ourselves the question of why openness? What is the
pedagogical gain? How can we use different kinds of openness to enhance
learning?
I am not
sure if this blog post makes sense, but the blog is supposed to be used for
reflections, and I guess that this post somehow gathers thoughts that have gone
through my mind in the last two weeks!
References:
Lequerica,
A. (2016) “Harvard and the Rise of a Digital Ivy Leage”, https://www.classcentral.com/report/harvard-digital-ivy-league/, accessed 20191021
Oddone, K.
(2019) “Open pedagogies: Transforming and empowering learning”, http://www.linkinglearning.com.au/open-pedagogies/, accessed 20191022
Wiley, D.
(2010) “Open education and the future”, TEDxNYED, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M, accessed 20191014
