Open education is scary

The second week of the ONL course was quite interesting, both the scenario and all the discussions within the PBL group and other PBL groups. My PBL group talked a lot about open education as a tool for sharing documents between teachers but also to teach students instead of the traditional way of teaching at a campus. My PBL group did agree that sharing resources between teachers is useful and we should do it, but we did not always agree on if open education was that good or “bad”. We decided that we should focus on two aspects of the scenario: “social and cultural understating of open education” and “quality in open education”.

Open education was viewed as an alternative to the “typical” campus teaching. Students would watch videos and view the material that teachers would have uploaded. This meant that any student around the whole world could participate in these open education courses. This sounds great on paper, but is it really that good? We started to discuss the quality aspects of open learning and asked ourselves the question: “who decides what is right?”. I think this is a very interesting question. When I teach, I provide the students with information that relates to our learning objective in the course, but is this the best way of teaching? We could use standard which would be set by experts. My PBL group discussed a bit of who is an expert and it could be a qualified teacher. In my opinion, an expert is one that is devoted and have a lot of knowledge within a subject, e.g. a professor. A person who has done a lot of research or worked within the field for a long time is an expert.

The cultural and social understanding of open education differs a lot, which again could cause some problems. An education that has much lower standards, less resources or less educated teachers does not have the same type of education as, for example, Harvard or MIT. These universities are considered the “best” universities and would mostly be a better choice than a random university in a small city in Sweden. The question everyone would ask themselves would be: “why would I choose a university with a lower reputation when there are universities with higher reputation?”. This could lead to less students participating in the traditional university life and committing to an open education instead. This would lead in to universities closing or reducing the amount of teachers needed at a university due to the lack of students.

Quality in open education is similar to the cultural and social understanding. The universities that have a better quality of education would have more students. The better universities would “obviously” have higher quality on their education which would simply attract more students to those universities.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) can be used in higher educations because it provides a more flexible, affordable and it is more accessible for any person who are interested in learning (Yuan & Powell, 2013). This can give access to a higher education for more people and they are not solve constrained by their financial situation or their geological location.

Open education (such as online learning) and remote education is not the same thing, remote education would only allow specific personas (students in the course) to participate (Zawacki-Richter et al. 2020). Open education is an interdisciplinary field that has been growing and evolving over time (Zawacki-Richter et al. 2020). Open education be very effective by allowing more people participate in the education, but open education can also lack the interaction between the teacher and the students. In a study done by Er et al (2009) they suggest that there should be two learning types to supports the students’ needs called blended learning which allows both synchronous and asynchronous education. I have a hard time believing that open educations can be done both synchronously and asynchronously. For me open education is done asynchronously which means that there would not be an interaction between students and teachers.

I believe that open education would be good for people who wants to learn something asynchronously due to time restrictions, financial sudation or geological position, but it should not replace traditional teaching.

References

Er, E., Özden, M., & Arifoglu, A. (2009). A blended e-learning environment: A model proposition for integration of asynchronous and synchronous e-learning. International Journal Of Learning, 16(2), pp. 449-460.

Yuan, L., & Powell, S. J. (2013). MOOCs and open education: Implications for higher education.

Zawacki-Richter, O., Conrad, D., Bozkurt, A., Aydin, C. H., Bedenlier, S., Jung, I., … & Kerres, M. (2020). Elements of open education: an invitation to future research. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(3), 319-334.