In a naïve way I always thought open learning is simply a process of allowing your students to access a common platform where they would find course resources and a chat room. I did use my friend Google to look at the structure of similar courses, and if I found a good open resource I would forward the link to my students. I never contributed to a MOOC, OER or open access publishing, but I did try some MOOCs. What I encouraged my students to do is to contribute to open source software (either by writing packages or by sharing knowledge on chat rooms). I also encouraged them to collaborate on GitHub. GitHub is much more than a social network for programmers where they share code, problems, collaborate, and keep track of the history of their code/project. A user can report an ‘issue’ and/or publish code; other users can ‘fork it’ and then, after the other users have worked on it, they can send a ‘pull’ request to the original coder who can then, after reviewing the code and the profile of the ‘forker’, ‘merge’ it ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3jLJU7DT5E).
Although it seems that institutes are embracing the concept of ‘open learning’, e.g. if you Google ‘open learning and #institute name#‘ you will find links to dissertations, OER, MOOCs and other publications (e.g. https://open.uct.ac.za/), but are they really embracing the concept of openness? Or is it a ‘buzz’ word? If one institute can have a MOOC, then surely our institute can have it as well? We already have the material, so why not make it open – just put it on the MOOC platform, add some videos, hire a tutor, and that’s it. For an amusing discussion of how an institute decides on ‘what we should do about MOOCs’, see Tony Bates’s tongue-in-cheek discussion. For a background on the history of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), see Weller (2014, Chapter 5) and Bates (2014, Chapter 5).
The
two most well-known type of MOOCs are:
- xMOOC – extended massive open online
course: the lecture is delivered by an
instructor to the student. Each individual is either an instructor or a
student.
- cMOOC – connectivism massive open online
course: participants are all considered
teachers AND
learners. Often contains content and promotes interaction through blogs,
learning communities and social media platforms – something like our ONL192.
On open learning platforms one can have various debates on the myths of MOOCs (e.g. or why MOOCs fail, but that is not the point. I realise that, for a MOOC to work and to take part in the ‘open education’ movement, I need to give back. I should connect, become part of the community, communicate with other users and respect copyright laws. Most of all, I should start sharing and practice my four C’s.
As an afterthought: I
know what an ’h-index’ is, but how do we define a ‘cloud-index’? How are we
going to be judge, in terms of ‘openess’?
Weller, M. (2014) The Battle for Open: How
openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5334/bam
Bates A.W. (Tony)
(2019). Teaching in a Digital Age.
Guidelines for designing teaching and learning, 2nd Edition. https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
