Open Learning – sharing and openess

What openness means for my own practice

My grandfather and grandmother were born in the 1890s. They grew up during the industrialization period, and experiences an enormous technological development for example telephone and television. As children of poor farmers were opportunity for schooling limited. Grandma told me that she had been privileged to go to school for 5 years, even if it meant a long walk through the woods.

My son, born in 1982, grew up with TV, Internet, home computer, computer games and mobile. He has been in school for 16 years. Since the 1990s, we have been in process of transformation from an industrial society to an information- and knowledge society. Information technology and data development have taken place extremely quickly during this period. More and more young people are undergoing university and college education compared with before. In working life, there is continuous development of skills and lifelong learning, Digital technology and internet have become indispensable both in everyday life and at work (Bates 2019).

During my years as a teacher, there has been a pedagogical development, from traditional campus didactic classroom teaching, that students now are more active in their own knowledge acquisition. In Sweden during the 2000s, the Net University worked with the development of IT-supported teaching and exchange of experience between higher education institutions. Web-based learning platforms and distance learning meant that teaching took place independently of time and space, and people living in sparsely populated areas was given the opportunity to obtain an education. Today, distance learning is very common in university education, both courses and programs.  

The online teaching has led to the development of information and communications technology (ICT) as well as educational materials in form of recorded lectures and other digital materials with texts and sounds. The teachers’ material has copyright, and means that it is the teacher who decides whether the teaching material should be posted on the learning platform. Sharing materials benefits both other teachers and students. With no material shared, there is no teaching/education. On the other hand, it is important that the person who created the material can continue to assess the quality, if the material needs to be revised, or removed from the learning platform.   

Educational materials in form of media, books, scientific articles and reports, and published with open licenses and free to download from internet are very useful in teaching. The term Open Educational resources (OER) describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve and redistribute under some licenses. One of these licenses is Creative Commons licenses. Taking part in other people´s, material, both teachers and students, contributes to collaborative learning. This will continue to develop the educational paradigm in the future (Bates 2019; Weller 2014).

Personally, I still have a lot to learn before I feel ready to share my teaching material in accordance with OER and Creative Commons licenses. However, my Grandma would probably been happy that I still contribute with distance education and try to develop the distance pedagogy for my students.

Topic 2 I learned many new concepts such as Personal Learning Environment (PLE), Personal / Professional Learning Network (PLN), Learning Management System (LMS) and Open Learning Network (OLN) and Massive Open Online Cource (MOCC). These different concepts spun for a while but now it feels more understandable (Bates 2019; Weller 2014) .

It becomes even more understandable when you understand that as a teacher you can use a Learning management system and use and mix different digital tools such as Google drive, Facebook, Blog etc. in the teaching.

For Topic 2 PBL13 used Miro