This week has been a difficult one. The course I am responsible for started, which means a lot of hours spend on that, plus I went to a conference for two days, plus all the rest of activities I usually do as a researcher (including a couple of deadlines)… and this only workwise. On a personal level, one of my kids has been sick, which means not many hours of sleep! However, all in all, I managed to complete the assigned tasks for the ONL course. And that is part of the beauty of online learning, the student set the schedule. In a similar way, the students of my course (a distance course in an undergraduate program) can do the same. Yet, for many of the students such level of freedom is too much, and they cannot structure their learning, meaning they fail… Others, however, manage perfectly. From my perspective, a part of belonging to one or the other group depends on the level of commitment of the students, or how necessary the course is for them. Yet, I wonder if the ability to structure themselves should be part of all distance/online learning courses to help those students at risks of getting lost during the learning process. Can we, as teachers, could handle this issue in any way (apart from guidelines and suggestion on how to schedule the tasks within a course)? Suggestions are welcome!

This week my group (Group #13) decided to prepare the Topic 2 report on video format. Check it, it is worth watching us! (https://padlet.com/rita_li/ONL181group13) While I was thinking on how to tackle the video assignment, I realized that it is not so easy to be totally open in an online course. There are a lot of obstacles that impede all or part of the online material to be totally freely available. In most cases, those obstacles are set by the higher education institution. Then, you see that even in online, “open” courses, you have to registered, and sometimes pay. That is a critical concept: if you pay, it cannot be 100% open (because then everyone would have access to it). Are we too greedy to share (as a society), even when what we share is nothing material, but knowledge?  An interesting way to handle this issue is to have the content totally free, but then if a student wants/needs a certificate, they must pay a fee for it. Although it stills mean you need to pay if you want to show that course on your CV in a “legal” way, at least all the content is free for everyone to learn. I experienced this type of learning with a course I did in Aerospace Engineering: Astronautics and Human spaceflight, which was a collaboration between the MIT and edX, and at that moment I thought it was pretty brilliant…

In addition, another aspect I have been thinking about before completing my task was the administration time you need to set up an online course. I work in Sweden, which is a country quite good for online higher education. Yet, the time you need to set up an online course in terms of administration is remarkable. I guess part of this time is aimed at controlling the quality of the course, which is good, but on the other hand, it can be a barrier for a teacher to share her/his knowledge in a free way.

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