“There’s a tsunami coming,” Pre-OLTD, if someone had told me to take a MOOC, I would have thought they were making a rude or derogatory comment. In fact, during a conversation with my colleagues at school, I had mentioned the possibility of taking a MOOC for professional development purposes—they looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language. Recently, I’ve noticed much more press about Open Educational Resources (OER), including MOOCs, and with all the recent (perhaps not so recent?) hype about OER, there is little surprise when the New York Times dares to declare it The Year of the MOOC (2012); leaving me to wonder if the tidal wave that is going to “disrupt” education has already hit, and perhaps myself and others I know are naïve to this fact. What is the role of openness in our education system? To begin, we must recognize that our students have grown-up in this digital world, and they effortlessly navigate to open (free) content as if it is a given. This digital generation sees the world as a participatory landscape; one that is free to take, create, remix and mash together ideas—it’s their right. Are we doing our students a disservice if we (teachers) restrict and limit content, ideas and resources? David Wiley expressed in his 2012 TED Talk, that withholding educational material is an “outdated idea” and he provided a compelling analogy between a closed LMS (learning management system) and Facebook, “if Facebook worked like Blackboard, every 15 weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, unsubscribe you from your groups…this not a way to build a community of people.” He goes on state that, “…openness is the only means of doing education…education is inherently a relationship of sharing and of generosity;” it is this premise that promises to fundamentally change learning and the role of education in the near future. | |
Some concerned educators see this influx of OER as decline in the quality of education and teaching, arguing that OER content and educational resources can be “uneven and depend largely on their sources” (Educause, 2011), or are ineffective at providing content in a constructive manner. Tony Bates (2011) argues that “the weakness with open content is that by its nature, at its purest, it is stripped of [these] developmental, contextual and ‘environmental’ components that are essential for effective learning.” As Tony sees it, the flaw with OER is the apparent deficiency of the “transactional processes” that occur when the learner is actively constructing new knowledge. Research has also shown that individuals learn differently, and as we are not a homogeneous group, it would be safe to say that many students would benefit from OER.
Open Educational Resources, MOOCs, etc, are not the panacea for educational reform, and OER may not transform education (or will it?); it does make education more accessible and convenient, less static, and it creates a “disruptive” force that compels educators to take notice of the changes that are coming down the pike.