2007年12月8日 星期六

OpenEd: Week 15

Blog your overall feelings about the course. On the content side, what did you learn? How will you use it after the class is over? What did we not cover that you realize now we really should have? On the process side, how could the class be better next time it's taught? What would you change? What would you keep? Is there anything we as a group can do after the course is over? (Stian Haklev)

Overall, I like this course. It is kind of special to experience learning by blogging. It is my first time to have this kind of class, without meeting teachers and students, but we read the ideas of students around the world through blog technology. It is interesting to read people who are not in the same place as where you stay, and get the responses from them sometime.

I learn more about open education through this class. In the first week we read regarding the right to education. I got a brief overview of the educational systems in different countries. The necessity of mandate education is also discussed. From the second weeks a serious of open-education related readings are provided. They help me have a better understand about the open education. The issues related to open education come from a variety of aspects, such as the motivation of sharing, the business model, the barrier of management of OER, the quality of OER, the sustainability of OER, different types of license, and their overlay, etc.

The links of five open education projects are good examples for us to know the current trend of OER movement. I am really with these websites which offer free learning materials. I find most of them have really high-quality learning materials. Audio, video, or interactive learning software are helpful for learners to engage in the learning processes. There are lots of meaningful and valuable materials are provided though this websites. It is beneficial for learners to have the opportunities to have free access to them without costing money. These free materials will bring more learning opportunities for people who live in poor areas if there are enough technologies offered for them to access these valuable learning materials.

Peer production is a model based on the idea of decentralization. Centralization provides explicit support, but the cost is expensive. On the contrary, decentralization allows more control over the courses, and explicit support is available through a group of participants. Decentralization is helpful for the sustainability of OER. Developing course contents by the modules is better for the long-term management of the websites.

I think the class covers most of important contents of OER. Reading other students’ blog is a good way for learning. Sometimes I couldn’t not grasp the main idea of the readings, what I did was to visit other blogs to see what had been posted, and read their postings. It really helped me to understand the main idea of the readings. In addition, by reading posting from other blogs, you could read some stories about the experiences of OER, and know the points of views of people from various places. Therefore, I think we can still keep the way for following students.

2007年12月1日 星期六

OpenEd: Week 14

Greg talked about some issues about getting tenure in higher education. He indicated that “faculty will increasingly become more exclusive, wealthy and childless. These "virtues" will be taught to all new students who go through the education system and higher education will soon become even more of an ideological mass production factory than it already is.” The life for professors to get tenure is very struggling if the tenure is judged mainly based on publications or grants. It makes me think more about the academic life.

He also indicated that “Higher education becomes more open to change, allows more time for faculty publications and grants, gets more money, and tenure becomes open to more diverse values than just publications and grants. Teaching in higher education becomes more open to techniques besides lecture and powerpoint, allowing students to "trib" a lot more.” Yes, I agree with that open education will help the tenure and job problems. Listening to students and understanding their needs are more important than just delivering all the knowledge to them.

Jessie talked about what she thinks that the effect of open education on the education system of China. It is interesting to read her article about if open education can prevail over China. I learn the history of China, but as for what’s happening for education in China now, I might not know, and have never experiences the education there. From Jessie’s point of view, “she feels like it is too difficult to change the traditional system of higher education. We talked about words like democracy and open for years, but hard to move on.” Yes, I agree with what her points. Open education will probably be hard to move on if there are some factors intervened, such as politics, policy, etc. And I also agree that in Chinese culture, parents have much more control over their children, compared to America. Convince parents to accept the benefits from open education will be important, and usually they pay tuition for their children.

It is fun to read
Rob’s post. He had five predictions toward open education in the future. The first one is “we will have compatible versions of the GFDL and CC licenses by 2010,” second “as new collaboration and communication tools are created and distributed over the next 10-15 years, more virtual schools like WGU will pop up, and the jucos, tech schools, and for-profit institutions will embrace collaborative education methods.” Third “textbook industry will go away as we know it.” Fourth, “young professors will adopt new teaching methods that leverage student and alumni knowledge and information-gathering skills to develop their lesson plans, giving them more time to complete their research.” Fifth, “my children will not remember a time when you had to pay for long distance phone calls.” I am impressive those five predictions, and agree with what he said. It makes sense to me, and it shows us the possible life in future open education. The license issues of OER will be solved by make a policy which makes different license rules more compatible in some situations. The compatibility of licenses is very important because it happens when people want to gather different information or resources from various websites which are licensed differently. The textbook is an issue that happens now. As we know, people would not like to pay much for just textbooks. The textbook industry might be aware of this, and might discover some other tasks they can do in the future.