This week we have discussed different aspects of openness in education. My group has discussed openness as three overlapping dimensions, Transparency, Engagement and Communication. We have been doing the research on a quite general level, but have not really engaged in much discussion about openness in our personal context. Personally I have participated in several MOOC courses and Open University courses during the past years, when I worked in business. As a fact, I am probably, at least partly, in my current position as a teacher thanks to that I have expanded my knowledge in a “hot topic”, business sustainability.
When it comes to sharing information about lectures, IT tools or anything else related to the education, I must say I have been really lucky as I do have great colleagues who openly share their knowledge and best practices. We often work in pairs and that has turned out to be a productive way to work.
During the past two weeks we have also had discussions about challenges and benefits of open education. Today, during the webinar, we had a discussion in break out rooms. What was interesting was, that one group had discovered that we, as teachers, see more challenges than benefits in open education, but when the group listed the benefits and challenges from the student’s point of view, they saw more benefits than challenges….This explains much how our mind works and why we should challenge ourselves to overcome the barriers.
When the facilitator opened the breakout rooms during the webinar today, many attendants left the webinar, which was really funny, as this is what our student often do…. It was really surprising that this happened also in a context like this. Well they missed a lot, as I found it really interesting to meet members of other groups to hear what they are doing. But the issue remains, how to avoid this? Why is a breakout room a scary place to be? Why do we want to escape a social, interactive situation like a breakout room? We actually discussed it during the webinar, as everybody noticed that the group suddenly decreased so much. How can we get the students understand that learning is not only about the product, it is also about a process? I really do believe that these kind of informal discussions in break out rooms help on memorizing and learning. One attendant suggested that teachers could use some kind of incentive. Well, I really do have to test different options, maybe bonus points for engagement?
