I have lately been diving into the pros and cons about openness in education. To tell you the truth, even if I have been offering MOOCs for years, I never actually thought about it. Also I had never herd the term MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses). Most of my students are degree students at the college, but all my courses are open to whomever wants to attend. Of course my courses aren’t nearly as massive as the courses offered at Coursera, edX or Udacity.
As I already mentioned, I had never heard of the term MOOC before. As it turns out, there are loads of similar abbreviations out there. Oddone, K. (2016) writes about several of them in her blog, like PLE (personal Learning Environment), PLN (Personal/Professional Learning Network), LMS (Learning Management System) and OLN (Open Learning Network). Her blog is great, thank you Oddone for clarifying these abbreviations for me.
Courmier (2010) talks about MOOCs as early as 2010, maybe even before that. According to him the MOOCs are courses open, participatory, distributed, and they support life-long networked learning. Do my “MOOCs” do all of that? Do they have to, in order to be considered “MOOCs”? What is the exact definition? Is there one? For example, when is a course considered “Massive”? I have about 200 students on my courses, is that enough to be massive? What does it mean for a course to be “open”? is it open if you have to register for it? What if the institution is making you get the credits and pay for them, is it not open? I guess not. At least not according to Courmier (2010), he is saying there has to be a way to participate for free in order for the course to be open. And how can you guarantee the material will be available for the students in the future? If it is on the internet it can be removed, maybe not by you, but someone else. I’m starting to realize, that my courses aren’t MOOCs, they are only “Semi-MOOCs”.
I immediately started wondering about the legal aspect of taking a course overseas. Normally, you would have to apply for a student visa if you’re not a citizen in that part of the world. As I came to find out, you can study as much online courses as you want, do a whole program (Education USA).
When your material is open for everyone to see, it is even more important to make sure you aren’t stealing from anybody else. Sometimes it is tricky to know for example what images are okay to use in education. The Creative Commons is a great tool. It is a non-profit organization that is giving free licenses for creators to use if they desire to make their work available to the public under certain conditions (Brown 2021).
Even when using the Creative Commons the different categories can be quite tricky to understand. A big help was the youtube video by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand (2011). In the video they explain what the different categories and symbols mean.
David Wiley (2010) talks about the future education and openness. Considering this video was made 11 years ago, I feel we are in the time he considers “future”. Still, in a way not much have change, although covid did give the online learning and MOOCs a big kick. The first time I attended a MOOC myself was covid when I took a Coursera course in statistics, just for the fun of it. Wiley (2010) further talks about the fact, that if you are in education, you should be willing to share and be open, that is the only way. But not all educators want to share. We discussed that in our PBL group as well. Does everyone need to share? Will you loose something by sharing? I like the quote by James Keller, “A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle“.
Ragupathi (2020) is comparing Open learning to the European coffee houses. I like that idea. It seams more relaxed when you put it like that. You see the image in front of you where students are discussing topics they are really interested in, and it isn’t a burden to them. They are there because they like to discuss the subject matter. It is like the end of the circle that started with the European coffee model, then got more “institutionalized” and now we are getting back to the end of the circle with the “Fika model” as Ragupathi (2020) explains to be open conversations, discussions and socialisation.
I think there is still a lack of clarity on what exactly the concept openness in education means, what are the criteria. at least I personally haven’t figured it out yet.
References:
Brown Liza. What’s YouTube Creative Commons and How to Use it to Make Video. Mar 23.2021. https://filmora.wondershare.com/youtube-video-editing/what-is-youtube-creative-commons.html
Courmier Dave. (2010 December 9). What is MOOC? [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc
Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand. (2011 October 12). Creative Commons licences explained. [Video] Edited by: Process Arts. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZvJGV6YF6Y
Education USA. https://educationusa.state.gov/your-5-steps-us-study/research-your-options/online-learning.
Oddone Kay. (2016 February 17). Linking Learning. PLE or PLN or LMS or OLN? https://www.linkinglearning.com.au/ple-or-pln-or-lms-or-oln/
Ragupathi Kiruthikaragu. (2020 January 5). Toward Open Learning. Being Open: Drawing parallels from the Coffee House Model. https://kiruthikaragu.wordpress.com/2020/01/05/being-open/
Wiley David. (2010 March 6). TEDxNYTED [Video] Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M
