Reflection week gives me time to catch up with all the ONL tasks I didn´t have enough time for during the last weeks. Next to setting up and organizing myself and the rest of the family in home-office, several online-meetings to convince teachers of the benefits of online-teaching (which is unavoidable at the moment due to contact limitations during the corona crisis) and after all easter-preparations (which also need more time than usual with entrance-limitations in the supermarkets) I have to admit ONL wasn´t always first on my to-do-list during the last weeks. So I really appreciate to have this week to catch-up.

First of all I used it to try to understand the set-up of a wordpress blog surface. Luckily my son helped his untalented mother with it, so I could correct the wrongly positioned first posts and really hope everything will work out smoothly from now on.

So, the week is almost over, but I still need to reflect on topic 2 – sharing and openness.

In our group we discussed the different meanings of openness. Does an open class have to be online? Is it really open, if there are people without access to computers or internet? Does open mean it has to be free of charge? What about language or reading barriers? I think we can conclude that it is absolutely difficult if not impossible to be open for every person. So how many people do we need to reach to be “open”?

We also talked about barriers and opportunities of openness. In the end we created three wordclouds for the concept of open learning, barriers and opportunities. Once again we also learned about the pitfalls of setting up wordclouds, like differently spelled words.

In my work openness and especially OER´s are getting more important. When I talk to teachers about publishing their contents as OER there are very big issues concerning copyright. If these are justified due to the concept of cc-licenses has to be discussed.

Probably knowledge should be a common good, but as long as we sell classes and educational books we have to think about what that would really mean.

When we talk about open or closed technologies the gdpr is a big issue, at least in the EU. As there are so many helpful open tools for teaching it would be great to use them. But can we expect our students to leave our closed LMS to use those tools? Could we probably embed these tools in our LMS? So many questions to be answered. Thinking about them is hopefully the first step to find solutions!