Open Learning means, to me, having free access to teaching materials and other learning resources. For example, available courses whenever and wherever I am without needing to pay for it. Thanks to the ONL-course, I got to develop an understanding of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and through the platform Class Central, I found an English course offered by the Kings College London that helps me to improve my English with people from around the world. It was a great learning experience and MOOCs are definitely an important instrument for lifelong learning.

In David Wiley’s TED-talk “Open education and the future,” he mentioned that openness and sharing in education means “being generous with other people”. And yes, I agree with this claim that knowledge should be considered a common good and be accessible as openly as possible.

For instance, I have lived in Brazil for four years, a land with extreme social inequality, including the education sector. Only the rich Brazilians are able to send their children to private schools and provide them a much better education than the chronically underfunded public schools are offering. And only these students are able to pass the university entrance exams for the prestigious public universities, which are free of charge meanwhile the poor have to pay the high tuition fees for the private universities. Yes, open education can contribute to a democratization of knowledge, especially in developing countries like e.g. Brazil.

Technology, especially the internet, plays a crucial role in this process since it allows people to share their contents worldwide – even if this is not always the case like David Wiley convincingly pointed out — in his TED-talk, “Open education and the future,” he speaks about Content Management Systems that limit access of knowledge to only specific groups through the use of passwords, etc.

I am absolutely willing to share my teaching materials with the others. But currently I am only able to share them with my colleagues by using a cloud offered by my host university (National University of Singapore – NUS). A greater spread is just not possible because the university owns the copyright of my materials.

Thanks to ONL, especially trough the Creative Commons Guide I also became more familiar with the different Creative Commons (CC) licenses (CC BY-NC-SA) and know now how to find open educational resources e.g. by changing the settings on Google. I also found an interesting website offered by my university entitled “Finding and Using Free-Use Online Content.”

I find the topic “Open Learning – Sharing and Openness” very interesting and personally enriching. One day, I would love to create and offer a MOOC.  On Class Central I found several MOOCs offered by NUS. Like all the top universities in the world, NUS is encouraging their faculty and staff members by offering a lot of support as I recently found out here. But we should not forget, that MOOCs are also an important marketing instrument for universities and also a financial resource by offering paid certificates.