Openness in higher education

I am very happy that I enrolled in the course Open Network Learning class 171, not only is the subject so (!) interesting and appealing, but there is also an air of openness in the course that I have not encountered before. I really enjoy that! I it very stimulating and I would like to give more of this feeling to my student as well as experience more of it myself. I so recommend this course (anyone can enrol before it starts) to everyone interested in teaching and higher education.

I have not been teaching in open learning myself but I have been inspired by others sharing their material online, and I have always admired them. Half through this course I can feel that in the future I would very much like to work in the direction of sharing my work online. I am not sure exactly in which format but I will work towards more openness.

Something I already now know that I will use in my work towards more openness in my teaching is Creative Commons (which has recently also been translated to Swedish!). They offer a very good way to decide how your open work can be shared by others through their CC license.

When working towards more openness in my education, something that I would appreciate is for universities to have polices and guidelines for how they view open learning. I have seen that some universities do have some guidelines but also that many does not, which is a drawback.

The main reason for why I want to work towards more openness in higher education is very simple. I just don’t believe that knowledge should be reserved for just a part of mankind or that “status” in higher education should be coupled to how few has been able to attend a certain education. The more knowledge based on scientific results we can spread and the more people that get interested and inspired from it, the better for all our futures!

One part about online learning course e.g. massive open online courses (MOOCs) that I feel very insecure about and feel that I must learn A LOT more about is assessment. I have read up on it a bit during Topic 2 in ONL171 but it is a very difficult subject. Any teacher, I am sure, know that giving grades in IRL courses can be tricky. Giving it in online open courses were you maybe never meet your students or you spend very little time assessing their individual assignments must be a lot harder. Even though I have studied a bit on tools like automated essay scoring (AES) or Calibrated peer review I am still very curious to see how assessment in e.g. MOOC works in reality. That is one of the reasons why I have enrolled in two MOOCs: Leaders of Learning and Design Thinking for Leading and Learning.

The reason why I find assessment of students work in e.g. MOOCs is that it is very important that open learning courses leads to certificates that shows which level of knowledge students have reached at the end of the course so that they can use it in their life. For me, at the moment, this is the most important question for the future of open online learning.

Another challenge in open online learning is those that normally might not go to higher education. If they don’t have the right tools in their backpacks when they start they might not finish and then we lose an important target group for open online learning. How can we overcome this problem? I don’t know, but I think that we have to be working on meeting these target groups where they are physically and being able to prepare them for open online learning there. These places will most certainly differ greatly over the globe and here governments and different organizations can play a big role in recognizing the possibilities people will have if they get the tools to manage participation in open online learning!

What do you think?