Week 2: Sharing and Openness

 

Open world (Private photo)

 

Openness was a subject I had never thought about regarding my teaching. And once we had the lecture with Maha Bali (Ragupathi, 2023), I felt like I had not understood the subject. For me it was confusing the idea of having to be open or creating openness in the classroom when the courses I participate in, are not open to the public, but instead are courses that are designed for the student to be present in the classroom. However, this subject became clearer once we had our group discussion and read the scenario proposed for this week’s work. I start by addressing the big questions, does openness matter to me in my teaching?

Sharing and Openness is for me highly related to collaboration, trust, teamwork, and motivation to help others to learn more. However, this has its caveats. One, and the main one to be discussed here, is the setting aspect. When I relate these two subjects to my teaching, I feel like they are unbalanced, but I am also not interested in having a perfect balance between them. What I mean with this idea is that sharing is something that we do almost in every lecture. I share my knowledge, but students also share their own opinions either during the lecture or between their classmates in group work. In other words, sharing is the subject that has more weight in my scale. Openness, on the other hand, is probably not as relevant for me, as it probably is for other teachers with presential and distance courses.

I can see the importance and benefits of sharing ideas in the digital world, and also, I have understood different strategies to approach this element in the classroom, if it ought to become relevant for the courses I am involved in. Openness can be useful to clarify your own ideas but also learn from others in the process, but also can help the student to visualize the type of work or future he/she wants to look for. One of the suggestions I had to maybe include more openness to one of the courses I participate the most, is to motivate the students to look for job positions that they think they would be interested in. They should be able to look for not only interesting or fun job positions, but positions that can be fulfilled with the skills they currently have. This activity should be useful for them to see what the job market is looking for, and to see what type of academic knowledge is required as well as skills that they need to develop during their university studies. In this way, my expectation is that they could later create their own LinkedIn profile and promote themselves from the beginning of their program, either by sharing posts, following companies they are interested in, commenting on other professional’s posts, etc.

In conclusion, openness matters to me in the classroom, but I do not consider it as relevant as it could because of the type of courses I teach. I am sure that the digital capabilities of my students could be more useful in courses where sharing online has its learning benefits.

Ragupathi, K. (2023, March 30). ONL231 Topic 2 webinar: Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qtiRUsXMd8

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