Topic 2: Open Learning — Sharing and Openness

This topic was a bit of a challenging one for me as the term “open learning” seems to have many different meanings and interpretations. So during the first week of this, I have to admit I was a bit quiet during our group meetings as I wanted to first grasp and learn this concept of openness.

My understanding of openness is: learning resources and materials that are free to access which can be associated with an educational institution or created independently by an academic individual.

Each week we use a different tool to work collaboratively, so this particular week we used a tool called Miro. I really enjoyed using this tool as you are able to build/create almost anything.

Our scenario was this:

I’m interested in opening up some of my courses and sharing the resources in a responsible way, but I don’t really know where to start. What options are there for offering courses that are open? How do I get support from my colleagues and how do I introduce the idea to my students? What are the opportunities and dangers of “going open”?

Through many different ideas of how to layout our research, we finally came to creating a triangle with a central idea and each point being a certain area of open learning that we wanted to explore further. We also wanted to explore 3 different perspectives: Student, Teacher and Institution. The reason for this is because open learning affects all three of these individuals. Students are responsible for consuming open learning resources, teachers are responsible for creating and facilitating these resources, and institutions are responsible for funding and facilitating open courses and resources.

With that being said, our 3 areas we focused on were: Dangers of open learning, Opportunities for open learning, Support/Solutions for open learning.

I think our research came out very well. My mind has definitely been “opened” to this world of open learning for the simple fact that I love the fact that students have the opportunity to go into more interest based learning. They learn what they want, when they want, and at their own pace (more on this idea in my next blog).

So all in all, my understanding on open learning is one that is not complete but enroute to have a well rounded picture of this phenomenon.