In this blog post I will reflect on Openness and sharing by writing about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Open Learning and a few benefits and hindrances of Open Educational Resources.
I believe that MOOCs and Open Learning are the future for many people who has not yet got the ability to educate themselves in higher education. MOOCs will make it possible for people all around the world to educate themselves in higher education regardless of social background or if they are rich or pour . The only thing that people will need is their own curiosity. As Martin Weller and Terry Andersson (2013) quotes Shirky (2012) in their article – ”The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education from current campus students to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system”. Also The Open Education Consortium (OEC) (www.oeconsortium.org) says the following in their vision ”We envision a world where everyone, everywhere has access to the high education and training they desire; where education is seen as an essential, shared and collaborative social good.”
To make higher education possible for everyone who wants to be a part of it, is in my point of view one of the greatest things about MOOCs and Open Learning.
The OEC also says that ”Sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built.” I totally agree on this and I don’t think that you need to sit in a classroom on a campus with the teacher in front of you to be able to take part of the teacher’s knowledge. This can just as easily be done by attending to a webinar and just as we have done in this course by collaborating online and sharing knowledge between us using online tools.
When it comes to Open Educational Resources (OER) I found an article by Gerd Kortemeyer (2013) which mentions four major hurdles that seem the likeliest hindrances to adoption of OERs and one of the hurdles is lack of quality control. The lack of quality control in OERs is also discussed as a challenge in a text from Open Educational Resources by Jan Hylen, CC-BY. This text list a few different approaches to the issue of quality management. The first approach says that some institution based providers most likely uses internal quality checks before the release of the courses just to ensure that the prestige of the institution is not at risk. The second approach is to have resources reviewed by peers. A third quality management approach is to let users be the judges by letting them comment or rate the resources. In my opinion it might be so that OERs might just be more accurate than texts in a book, because of the fact that they are open also gives the user the right to change and update the content keeping content timely, relevant and accurate which is discussed in the article ”What is open education?” by opensource.com.
In our PBL group we have made a mind map of various aspects of Open Learning and Openness and sharing. I share this here since I think it gives a good summary of what Open Learning – Openness and sharing is all about. The mind map was created with a online tool called Coggle (coggle.it) Click on the link or on the picture below to get to the mind map.
Online participation & digital literacies