For the second topic, Victor and I were in charge. The topic was how to create open material, what are the obstacles, and more importantly what are the benefits. This was an interesting topic, and our group had many interesting and heated discussions on this issue! Where Victor in particular made fiery speeches (and even a presentation!) in defense of open education, arguing mostly from a moral perspective on the importance of making education available to everyone, whereas many others in the group (myself including) rather saw all the problems, including issues as to who is going to pay for us to create this material, will our universities really allow us to open up our courses (thereby possibly missing out on tuition fees), etc etc. The benefits of sharing are essentially obvious. As Victor adamantly argued, education should be for everyone, and not locked up to select few. Openeness creates equality.

It is one thing to create a MOC, or open up an existing course fully to the world, to releasing tidbits of material from your courses. The former is obviously a massive undertaking, where there are undoubtedly major hurdles to overcome. The latter is far less complicated. I.e. you can release nuggets, lectures where you cover a topic that you truly master. Such material would be useful for students, as well as for fellow teachers, and can also be used by the university to showcase specific courses or programs (in other words, technical/financial support to generate such videos can be sought from you department). 

Interestingly, just before we had this topic, there was an interesting discussion on my twitter timeline relating directly to this. A colleague posed the question on why on earth we are all recording videos outlining the same things, when there are already a zillion semi-professional to fully professional videos on that exact same topic on e.g. youtube, doing a much better job of explaining it. Thus instead of everyone making crappy videos we should make use of available material, and use the time with the students to discuss and engage the topic. For this to work though, we all need to share. 

Our group prepared a presentation of our thoughts and discussions on this topic using Prezi. 

https://prezi.com/view/IsV78cBtrhSEGa3rMX2a/

over and out, Marcus