Open Learning - Sharing and Openness

 

The second topic is Open Learning - Sharing and Openness. And it is a vast topic, covering such different areas as the individual creator´s rights to his/her creations as well as openness and rights to education from a societal perspective - from copyright issues and creative commons to Article 26 of UN Declaration of Human Rights, Democratization of Knowledge stating that Education is a public good and should be made available to all. This blog post will focus on only a few aspects of sharing and openness.

What is openness on a personal level?

In the webinar lead by Maha Bali, she asks the participants; what is openness to you? – and the answers varied greatly. The discussion also covered if openness is beneficial and valuable – and there is no right or wrong answer. Openness needs to be evaluated in a context, and sometimes it is valuable and sometimes not.

 

A model for openness

Cronin has developed a model with four levels for individual openness

·        macro (global level) will I share openly?

·        meso (community/network level) whom will I share with?

·        micro (individual level) who will I share as? and 

·        nano (interaction level) will I share this?

 

She also states that “openness does not involve a one-time decision, and it is not universally experienced. It is always complex, personal, contextual, and continually negotiated.” And I couldn´t agree more. Through this course, I have been completely comfortable sharing with the small group, but extremely reluctant to share on the macro level. This has not always been easy.

 

Open Education

Another aspect of openness is open admission to courses that are free of charge. The definition of open education according to The Open Education Consortium is "resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide." (Cronin 2017)

 

For this course, we were encouraged to register for an MOOC, I enrolled to Leaders of learning at HarvardX. The admission was open, but once I was registered, it wasn´t completely free of charge. Some of the content was locked and to get the certificate and full access to the course, a payment needed to be made. So it really wasn´t free; inexpensive for a Harvard course, but a lot of money for a private person. The fact that payment was required for full access, was quite a surprise, since it seems the common view of MOOCs are that they are free of charge.

 

Open Educational Resources

Yet another aspect of openness, is Open Educational Resources (OER). According to Cronin, “OER are resources whose creators have expressly enabled reuse through the use of open licenses”. During the course, it has become clear that the sharing of OER is not extremely well developed as opposed to the MOOC:s for which there is an extensive range of courses available from different universities.

Having worked at a publishing firm, developing educational material, I can see that developing material for others to use requires a lot work, especially with regards to text books. The logic and structure of the book, the editing, the layout, the photos; getting a book together is so much more than writing the first draft. Also, the aspect of availability must be considered. I can see how potential authors would have difficulty finding creative resources who will do all the tasks required to finalize a text book and not get paid. Even though students don´t pay for free text books the authors and creatives pay, but with their time.

And do professionals want to share their knowledge and methods without getting paid or recognized? Even Maha Bali, mentioned in the seminar, that when Corona broke out, she was hesitant to share her knowledge on how to create online courses just like that; she had to debate with herself whether to share her knowledge or not share, but in the end she did.

Sharing our unique competence indiscriminately might not be as evident as one thinks, maybe collaboration is key in sharing? I believe that collaboration will be addressed in the next topic.

 

References

Webinar Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices, Maha Bali (Cairo American University) and Kiruthika Ragupatha (National University of Singapore).

Webinar: Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices - LnuPlay - Linnaeus University MediaSpace

Cronin, C (2017). Open Education, Open Questions, EDUCAUSE Review 52, no. 6 (November/December 2017)

Open Education, Open Questions | EDUCAUSE

Kommentarer

  1. Alastair Creelman4 januari 2022 kl. 02:02

    Very valid points and as you write this is an extremely complex topic. I have changed my attitude over the years from my initial enthusiasm to openness in everything to a more nuanced approach as described by Catherine Cronin. There are still genuinely free and open courses out there (ONL is an example) but sadly MOOCs have been hijacked by big business and as you have discovered the main platforms like EdX and Coursera now only offer access for free, everything else costs money. I still believe that universities can offer their resources freely since they have been created with public funding and the public should be able to access what they have paid for. But that has to be done responsibly. There are many good examples in the world but sadly most resources are locked away.

    SvaraRadera

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Learning in Communities - Networked Collaborative Learning

  The third topic is on Learning in Communities – Networked Collaborative Learning . In our course material, Kay Oddone discusses personal learning networks (PLN), online learning communities and personal online learning networks. According to Kay Oddone, there are quite a few definitions of PLN; but she also says that, in reality, it really is a personal experience. The term PLN started to appear in the late 1990:s, in 1998 Daniel R. Tobin published a web article Building your own personal learning network. Tobin´s definition of a learning network was “a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience”. According to Kay Oddone, the definition is still valid, although how we learn and what we learn through our networks have changed, partly due to new technologies. The power of online PLN:s come from the interaction that occurs. PLN:s are based on social lear...
Läs mer

Lessons Learnt and Future Practice

As a final task on this course, we are to define our key lessons learnt. The course has been different from what I expected, but it has been very interesting, and I have gotten a lot of new ideas and references. Below you find my personal reflections. I hope you find them useful!   1.      IT is a skill/competence that needs to be developed and nourished a.       Students and young people are just like older people with regards to IT skills. Some are really good with IT and some are not, some are natives and some are not. IT and learning new IT solutions quickly, is a skill and a competence, necessary for finding information, when preparing presentations, taking online courses etc. So why don´t we have courses that focuses on how to learn IT skills? We wouldn´t dream of expecting students to know grammar in their native language without ever having had a grammar class. IT is similar to grammar; one has to understand the structure a...
Läs mer

Online participation and digital literacies

Bild
  This is my first blog post in the course Open networked learning focused on teaching at universities in an open networked environment. I am attending the course as an open learner, not affiliated to any university.  There will be five blog topics and this topic is the first one, Online participation and digital literacies . In the course we always have a group task and in addition, write a blog post individually, so sometimes I will be referring to my own reflections and sometimes to discussions in our group as well as literature, which of course can be recordings on Youtube 😊 . Part of the literature studies, was to watch David Whites presentation on visitors and residents. It made me reflect on if students should share their point of view publicly early on in their academic studies or wait. Is it in the best interest of students to share their point of view early on or should they await further into their academic studies? It is a decision students should take actively a...
Läs mer