My first impression to ‘Open Education’ was rather sceptical, perhaps due to my personal perception of the word ‘Open Education’. Copy right issue and non-authorised sharing of materials were some of the past experiences in open education for me. However this time, I would like to learn more what ‘Open Education’ really means.
While reading the references and the webinar prepared by Alastair and Kiru, I came to reflect about what educators’ role and responsibilities in the open education context. Educators’ responsibility traditionally covers from creating educational resources (e.g. hard-material like textbook & soft-material like curriculum design and activities) to delivering them to learners in a private space. However, open education aims to share ‘educational resources’ among educators and learners. It makes me think how I can re-define or evolve the role and responsibility of educators in open education, and how I can contribute to the community more meaningfully as educator.
From the discussion during my PBL 11 meetings, I learnt that we can provide constructive feedback to each other and continuously can improve ourselves in developing the educational resources. And we can be agreeable on how we adopt the educational resources originally created by others. To me, this is a matter of culture. Culture in the community, we can mutually agree to respect the copy right and ethics in accessing to others’ work.
Besides, I appreciate that this opportunity to understand open education made me realise that I have encourage my students co-create open resources. A wonderful written work created by one of my students actually inspired me that I could use that piece as a model for future students. I asked that student for a permission to share it open (e.g. for any potential students), and he happily agreed to that. In this activity, my student became a co-creator of open educational resources. The unique learning point from this experience was that learners, not only educators can contribute to sharing educational resources. More importantly, the student who was invited to share his works seemed to improve in his writing in further submissions after the experience of sharing the work. I may speculate that he self-motivated in the performance for potential opportunities of sharing his work again. In consequence of sharing the work, the contributing learners can also get benefited by co-creation of open resources in the education context.
This approach can be applied to the entire class, but I am, at the same time being cautious of unnecessary stress of sharing the works could be seen from some students. After all, open education requires a great deal of courage!
Interesting to think about the connection between teachers and students as producers of teaching materials… and I have a similar experience about the willingness of students to share. In different courses, I sometimes have an approach where the students individually or in groups work with different case studies based on certain given conditions and instructions. A job that may take 2 weeks. In the end of the assignment, I create smaller groups of 3-4 students, where they can read each other’s submitted reports in preparation for an oral seminar where, based on new issues, they continue to process the material together, but now across several case studies. I have never experienced that any student has not wanted to share their work in this way and the quality of the reports is usually quite high. It is certain that you sharpen up a little and perform better when you know that more than the teacher should read what you have done. Very rarely does the plagiarism control react to these works, and since the instructions contain a section on copyright, there will not be many problems with such either. That students share is positive for the quality!
Co-creation of resources by students is a strong motivator since they know that what they produce will be seen by more than just the teacher. Suddenly they have a potential audience and generally this has a positive effect.
You can learn more about getting students to produce resources on a site run by a colleague of mine, see https://studentgeneratedcontent.weebly.com.
Hi Mihi,
So nice to get to share your thoughts. We come from such different cultures so it is really interesting to share experiences and thoughts with you.
I too believe that it takes courage to share and I do believe that sharing can be stressful for our students. But I also believe that it is important to practice sharing as the society and our jobs depend on sharing, both ideas and knowledge.
I also want to say that I am happy to read that you are happy with our constructive feed-back in our PBL-group. It is so important, I think, to give good feed-back so that a person can grow.
So thanks for sharing!
/Inger
Interesting perspective, Mihi. Like you, I was also sceptical about “Open Education’ before the ONL Programme. Nevertheless, after 2 weeks of discussions in my PBL Group and learning from the topic, I am more ready to explore open education. From the reading and reflection, my thought of the key factors underlying an effective and successful open education are Openness, Accessibility and Collaborative Learning. I also share your thought about learners can be co-creator of open educational resources if we create a conducive learning environment and by leveraging the benefits of collaborative learning. Cheers!
Thank you for sharing a very nice example of how this topic on open education has prompted you to consider the possibility of getting your students to create or co-create open resources. In my experience, when students are given the opportunity to share their work with a wider audience, the the quality of the work is generally high as they are very aware of the fact that this will be read by others other than just the teacher. One example from our campus of such sharing can be seen at: https://equalitydemocracy.commons.yale-nus.edu.sg/