Open Learning – Sharing and Openness

So far I have felt overloaded
and stressed, but gradually I learn more to handle all “technical” things
around, so it takes less time, which gives me more time to really do the course
readings, even if I read the wrong chapter 10 in Bates (should have been 11…)
But- it was interesting and appealed more to my interest- that’s what we teach:
Student centred learning! We were also merged to a new group (11+6) which gave
all of us wider aspects and discussions! We work well together!

Alastair Creelman and Kay Oddone’s
webinar was a very good and overviewing start of topic 2, and it’s well worth
to go back and listen again.  

I definitely reflected over Openness, however I discovered that we are very closed in our courses- all in Canvas where you need a password to get in- even in a course that could have been open- it’s something to think about.. In Sweden we are very identity fixed, so in MOOCs I wonder how to secure the identity of the participants? Might be easy to get a diploma? On the other hand MOOCs feels Democratic as it is reachable for almost all people. I sent site suggestions to my x-bonus son in Mocambique, now working far out in the countryside, but do have access to internet via his phone and he was super happy for the possibility to study his area of interest- ECO environment engeneering.

(In the Swedish health care
system we are talking a lot about digitalization in all kind of aspects, e.g.
net doctors, outback medicine (distance medicine), etc. That is very closed. On
the other hand, patient- and staff information, courses, instructional films
etc, many times in many languages, are all open for anyone to reach.

Openness for me means easy access to useful readings including research articles, textbooks, instructional films, different presentations etc. We had a great zoom discussion in a break out PBL group and we learnt a lot about Creative Commons and the different licenses, which I didn’t think so much of before the course. I discovered that our institution uses CC-BY-NC-ND on our media products www.play.ki.se. Openness about the media means that it is “open” for the staff to use, not people in common. We have not talked so much about CC at my unit and I think we need to bring that up for a broader discussion and for a common consensus in different situations. I like to share my presentations with the students as it is a good reminder for them to repeat and the goal is that they actually learn about the subject, but not all of us are likely to do that (“It’s mine”..)

About online-learning, there
are many different grades of models from pure face-to-face, blended learning,
to fully online. It is argued that fully online is best for adult people with a
certain amount of former education, but face-to-face compared with blended
learning, blended “wins”, Bates (2019). It’s probably because it covers more
“learning styles” so more students have the chance to absorb the ILO:s? I can also
agree that younger people/children are not always in the cognitive mood to take
the responsibility for self-directed learning, to online-learn all by one self.
One need a big amount of self-discipline!- and MOTIVATION!

According to Means et al. (2010), in Bates (2019), there is little difference in learning outcome when compare online-learning with face-to-face learning. One of the findings is that it is not the distance, student- University campus, but the possibility to flexibility e.g. decide when to study, that matters to the students as many have a job parallel to the studies and families.

So what
about the quality of open educational materials? One interesting thing about credibility
is Wiley’s (2013) blog text about quality, when Nature compared ca 50 Wikipedia
texts to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the result was 162/123 errors, mainly
smaller ones, which shows that we may be should be more open minded to open
resources, that not always are peer reviewed. For example our school children
are not allowed to refer to Wikipedia as a trustable source in their
assignments…

Another is
that it is not always worth to spend lots of money to get a professional help
for designing the teaching (online) material as he declares: The educational
material’s beauty and design is not important if the students don’t learn what
they should, but no matter if the material is ugly and “unprofessional” if the
student actually learn the ILO- then it’s high quality! Wiley (2013).

References:

Bates (2019) https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/ Accessed 2019-10-31

Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/ Accessed 2019-10-31

Creelman. A, Openness
and sharing in education https://play.lnu.se/media/t/0_o3kepcds Accessed 2019-10-31

Wiley, D. (2013) On
Quality and OER by DAVID on OCTOBER 10, 2013 https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2947 Accessed 2019-10-31