New topic, new challenges.

The new topic caught our group somewhat by surprise, since we had the face-to-face meeting on Monday morning and nobody could check the material… This was not good, more so since I was leading the meeting ! However, I must admit that it was very nice to see where the discussion led us.

When it comes to openness and sharing, I guess most of us agree that the Nordic countries are quite good at it. I live and work in Sweden and, after some years here, I have got used to give a lot of things for granted when it comes to open education and sharing teaching material. However, a member from our group is from Brazil, and when we read the scenario for this topic she mentioned a few issues that surprised more than one in the meeting (mostly those working in the Nordic countries). Then, another person explained the situation in her home country, South Africa, which was also an eye-opener for some. All these comments about the difficulties to be open and share in higher education took me back to my pre-PhD period, in Spain. I could totally identify most of the difficulties in open learning raised by my two colleagues.

With this background, I started to check the material for Topic 2. The information about the Creative Commons (although a bit repetitive given the workshop on Topic 1), and the MOOCs was nice. But the highlight for me has been the TED talk by Dr. David Wiley. In the context of our PBL group meeting, you can clearly tell he is coming from a USA background where everything related to open (and free) education is problematic. There are three messages that I will take home from his talk; (i) education is not competitive, but giving and sharing (generosity), (ii) at the moment, we have an unprecedented capacity to share, (iii) most problems in the new digital education era come from outdated thinking. For those like me, working in the Nordic countries (higher education is totally free) the future seems to look promising, and the online era is rapidly being integrated to higher education. But, in ALL those countries where higher education is not 100% free, digital education will create a lot of conflicts, since the “openness” factor will have to get bigger than the “profit” factor. How to do this in a successful way? I have no idea. But I guess (and hope!) courses like the one we are following will help.

After re-reading my blog, I want to clarify that not everything related to online teaching/learning in the Nordic countries is better, it is just easier. How other countries adapt to the new higher-education environment will define their future success to attract international students. In the case of Spain, I would like to highlight that although the system is not facilitating the openness factor, most of the professionals I know in education are very generous by nature. Hopefully this individual factor will prevail over the profit-view of institutions.

Photo by: Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalo – CC BY-NC-ND