As the world becomes ever more connected and as COVID continually pushes us online, this topic seemed very important to explore. I have been interested in open online courses for several years and have my fair share of experience participating in MOOCs on platforms like FutureLearn, however coming at it from the planning side was much more complicated than I’d expected.
As a research assistant, I did get to see the construction of a FutureLearn course on mental health in adolescents, and was fascinated at how all the pieces came together – this also formed my understanding of what open online courses looked like. However, coming at it the entire topic from scratch as a team opened up many more questions and really challenged my concepts of what open learning means. At times our group work seemed quite chaotic – I was contributing and building a picture based on my existing experience and I imagine others were too, with other types of experience. This led to some confusion about the scale and components of our example online course – was it based on a teaching course we were already teaching and we just wanted to put it online? Or were we doing a fresh big new course purely on a platform? For the former, how do we incorporate assessment methods? For the latter, how do we make it accessible but also engaging and manageable for us as creators? It became increasingly clear that being on the same page about exactly what is meant by our open course was crucial. The result of us achieving this was a summary of options that allowed space for different ideas within a general framework of putting a summer course online (Link to the roadmap)
I am personally very interested in online spaces and using these for communicating concepts to wider audiences, and I’m planning to use platforms such as YouTube to begin putting this interest into practice. Thus, for me this topic was helpful not just for online courses but for sharing and openness in general. I really liked the ‘coffee-house’ concepts introduced in the literature (Ellis, 2008; Peter & Farrell, 2013; Ragupathi, 2020), wherein there are established frameworks/environments for these spaces but they are accessible to all. I’m passionate about information being accessible regardless of background, so this resonated with me.
As with Topic 1, it was useful to draw on each other’s experiences, explorations and knowledge of different tools and spaces to build a wider repertoire. And as mentioned, it was both challenging and helpful to confront assumptions around my concept of open learning and expand my definition of this. I’m excited to take this understanding with me, both in my professional work and extra-curricular activities.
Finally, this topic has also coincided nicely with my other teaching course, with our current module being ‘assessment techniques’. The importance of choosing the right tools for the type of learning, levels of understanding and platform was emphasised there, and it has been interesting to consider how this differs online vs offline (well, ‘offline’ being teaching a normal class but on Zoom currently). Something I think would be a really helpful action to accompany these reflections is building a directory of sites and tools that can be picked and adapted for different spaces and audiences. As I’m sure many other useful things will come to light in the coming topics, I plan to bring this together towards the end of the ONL course and my other teaching course.
References
Ellis, M. (2008). An introduction to the coffee-house: A discursive model. Language & communication, 28(2), 156–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2008.01.004
Peter, S., & Farrell, L. (2013). From Learning in Coffee Houses to Learning with Open Educational Resources. E-Learning and Digital Media, 10(2), 174–189. https://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2013.10.2.174
Ragupathi, K. (2020). Being open: drawing parallels with the Coffee House model.
