Posts made by Gina Bennett

What is my ideal future for OER? If I am looking around in 5 years' time, this is what I hope to see:

  • There has been a philosophical shift in academia, a paradigm shift that has rotated our attitudes 180 degrees regarding 'ownership' of educational resources. Publishing educational resources openly is the default & open-facing institutions such as Otago are the norm rather than the exception. If you have been paid with public monies to develop an educational resource, you will need a damn good reason to hoard copyright. Educational resources (especially those contributing to basic education, the kind of education you need to earn a living & contribute back to your society) will be seen as a common good & you & your institution will be rewarded in a variety of other ways for contributing them. I don't think this is just crazy-talk. How many of us can remember when it was perfectly acceptable to smoke wherever we wanted? Back then you needed a damn good reason to deny somebody the right to smoke. We really are able to make significant cultural changes when we all recognize that it's for the common good.
  • What opportunities do I see for learners & instructors? Maybe in 5 years or maybe in 10? Educationally, at least, there is no sharp distinction between the 'developing' & 'developed' world. Aren't we all developing in some ways? But I think the biggest change will be in what educators will be doing with their time. We will not be hoarding educational resources & if we are caught doing so, it will be shameful. We will be doing less teaching in secret; there will be less 'gnostic' instructional practice. As Mary & Roger have suggested, some classes will be conducted with more privacy than others, for a variety of reasons. But exercising the right to deny access to educational resources, through copyright, will not be one of them.
  • With so many more educational resources available to them, learners will have different needs & educators will have different roles. Inexperienced or dependent learners will be looking for educators to help them navigate the sea of resources and to assist with the soft skills of educational planning, motivation, time management, & just plain studying. We will do less writing, less classroom management & more of the actual teaching that we love to do. There will be many more independent, experienced learners who have achieved complex learning goals outside of traditional academia & will need educators to help them assess what they've learned & receive credit & credentialling for what they now know & are able to do.
What am I willing to do to make this happen? Whatever!
Scott, I am enjoying your provocation thoughtful.

So... "LMS are where OER go to die"... well, maybe they don't go to die -- nothing really dies on the internet -- but I can agree at least that LMS are where OER go to hibernate. You made a comment earlier this week: "if we start to identify the benefits to learners, the institution and instructors of learning taking place out in the open so that serendipitous interactions with real world experts can occur ... our efforts at openness will by default become sustainable." So both these comments got me thinking about our reasons for hiding the act of teaching behind LMS logins. Often we say it's to protect the privacy of our students but of course much of it has to do with the shyness of the instructors about making their (possibly substandard) work public. It is this focus on Creating Content as if content -- knowledge itself -- were somehow a fixed thing, a product rather than a process. How can we get used to teaching in the open?

I audited an online sort of course a couple of years ago from UC-Berkeley. The course was InfoSys296A: Open Source Development. Although one of the instructors was the founder of Lotus software company, the course itself wasn't really flashy: a bunch of (poor quality) videorecordings with some standard mp3 podcasts. The really interesting thing about the course was that the entire class delivery was radically open. There was a class website & all work was done in the class wiki. Nobody seemed to worry about the fact that the students' work was visible to the world. Our first assignment was to add something new or to substantially edit something in Wikipedia. This is an incredible lesson in contributing to open education & I think everybody should try it at least once (the experience is not always positive!) Anyway, it opened my eyes to what 'teaching in the open' could be like; to the notion that one's OERs need not be works of art, & that the teaching & learning process need not be something to hide behind closed doors.