During the two-week course period for Topic 2, each member of our PBL group investigated the willingness and chanllenges of openness from our own insititution. Here, I would like to share with you my little investigation on Stockholm University.

“Since 1878, Stockholm University has been characterized by openness and innovation (www.su.se/english).” Currently, we offer 75 master’s programmes and a large number of independent courses taught in English, within science, humanities, social sciences and law. The master programs are free for the students with citizenships within the EU/EEA and Switzerland. However, there is a tuition fee for the international students to attend the master program at SU from other countries.

Willingness of adopt openness

Many of our courses are made open to students from other universities in Sweden and international exchange students especially from partner universities by the institution, as standalone courses.

Moodle, Athena are used to facilitate teaching and learning for the teachers and the students at SBS.

You can easily check the online modules for many courses on Moodle via https://turing.dsv.su.se/ . However, you may only access the materials through a university account or a Moodle account. For Athena, you may only access to the general course information and course materials through a university account or an itslearning account.

Course materials are oftentimes open to all the users even if the students don’t register for a specific course. But of course, the level of openness for each course especially the specific course materials is partly decided to the course directors. Teachers oftentimes integrate other online open educational recourses into our teaching by directing the students to other recourses for them to enhance their learning after class.

In addition, many research seminars offered by the departments at Stockholm University are open to everyone. For example, the Finance section at Stockholm Business School organizes weekly Finance seminars which are fully open and require no registration. Locations and/or zoom links for the seminars are shared on http://www.sbs.su.se.

Challenges of openness

How to keep our own program and education competitive in a world towards more open education is clearly a challenge.

When we introduce/ integrate online open education resources, we should critically think about the pros and cons of these resources and especially regarding “Pedagogy comes first”. The ultimate objective to introduce openness in our course and education is to promote students’ learning. We should provide clear motivation and guidelines to the students why we would refer the students to a specific open recourse and in what way the students may use them for.

Students may sometimes feel overwhelmed when faced with so many open education resources. We as educators should think more about how we can help the students effectively identify and make use of the online open education resources for their learning practices in general.