Based on the previous post, let’s say I decided to stay and be a digital resident in my institutional persona. What options are there? Where do I start? In this analogy, which neighborhood would foster better my ONL development? And also doubling down on the analogy, what neighbors should I aim to stay in touch with?
First things first, I want to become digital resident but I should be aware of how people live in this neighborhood. I can make the analogy to when I moved to Sweden. It struck me as different that people didn’t use curtains and/or blinds. I felt that people would be observing, watching, creeping into each others lives. I decided to embrace it little by little… keeping the lights on and just being more comfortable with feeling exposed. It didn’t come naturally at first but one has to just do it and get more familiar with it. This can be traced 1-to-1 to what we will have to experience if we want to have a greater presence online. This applies to any content produced for teaching: slides, text, and in particular video content.
Going the ONL is not an easy job and no one should do it alone, but how does one get support from my colleagues and introduce the idea to the students? My guess is that one has to start somewhere. If you drive the change maybe some of your colleagues are more likely to “just” follow the trend. Obviously people of different groups (age, backgrounds, styles, needs, impairments, etc.) will be differently engaged into this novel approach. I think selling the concept of digital literacies to lectures and professors can lead to a wide range of results.
The students are generally very open to anything the lectures bring/provide and they, in my experience, seem very keen on not having “classical” lectures only as part of their university studies. Having the possibility to review material “on-the-go” and give immediate feedback about its clarity/effectiveness is something I imagine they would be very open to (pun intended).
But, what are the opportunities and dangers of going open? The first thing that comes to my mind is where to start? There are plently of Open educational resources (OER) but do you base your lectures on someone else’s that are known and praised? Say MIT online course and the like. This would be a good starting point. Or is it?
If you base your material on other’s people content how would it be perceived as an statement on your skills? Is the university and you as a lecturer not leaders? or will we be seen as just followers?
In the book Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning Bates, T. (2015) A need for openness access in higher education is discussed and in particular they mention the University of Phoenix in the U.S. However I think there are a lot of caveats to Open Networking Learning. Would you bring your pet to a veterinarian whose education was entirely base using OERs? Would you go to a similar physiotherapist? physician?
