After reading this week’s materials, my understanding of open education and it’s structure and history. Like the open course that Alec Couros did in mentioned by Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice by Major, C. H. (2015), open courses can be really helpful because it attracts people who really interested in the topic to share their ideas and help students who are formal learner to understand the topic better. Just like when Alec Couros called on internet for mentors, those profs and teachers came to join the course as “outsiders”, they are rich in experience on the field and knowledge on the topic, people who were interested in the course and get a chance to learn, without the restriction of who can join and who can not join, both formal/nonformal students and those outsiders were benefited, that challenged the traditional teaching ways.
Honestly I did not read Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide by Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017) deeply, there are too many informations, but one thing I noticed is the development of learning education was with the development of technology. New technologies were used and created new opportunities, new platforms and tools were introduced. But I wonder is the developing of open education is the inevitable phenomenon or it was inspired by new communication technologies? Like what if internet was never invented and will open education still appears? If so, how? What tools and platforms will be used? If these conditions are really unuseful, will open education still exists? (imagine if people needs to take days and weeks to receiver others’ message, depends on distance). Personally, I enjoy the open learning, more options are possible for me to search information and find help, that makes the learning easier and more interesting, kind of to learn actively rather than follow the textbooks.
Reference:
Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 76-108)
Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017). Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.
Hi Ziwei,
Online teaching technology has improved in the past two or three years. Maybe in a few years, with the advancement of technology, online teaching can be like face-to-face teaching that allows students to immerse themselves in learning and communicate efficiently.
Jindi
Hi Ziwei,
Thank you for sharing! Your question makes sense. As far as I am concerned, I think open teaching should be something that people have long wanted to do. Since there was no Internet before, people could only spread knowledge by word of mouth and books. This makes teaching very expensive and a lot of knowledge cannot be widely disseminated.
For this reason, people at that time also adopted some measures to carry out offline open education. Such as inviting experts from all over the world to hold a week-long academic conference in a certain location. But it often requires multiple sponsors to pay a hefty fee. In this regard, the cost and time saved by online learning is huge.
Cheers,
Yaqi Zhang
Hi Ziwei,
your post is very knowledgeable, thank you for sharing it. I think that if open education and open learning was more regulated and intertwined into our education, we would see it being chosen more often.