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Mark Johnstone started the topic How do you design for open learning? in the forum Design for Open Learning 10 years, 6 months ago
Today on linked in I found a post by someone talking about learning design. He was thinking about the open web and incorporating it into his course and said that he preferred to force users to stay on his course and finish it as he’d intended.
He explained that he worked in corporate training – AKA compliance learning.
I work in an institutional framework in HE. Some of us use an LMS and supplement that with GoogleDocs. Someone today in a meeting said that she used to use GoogleDocs too but since the institution had withdrawn support for it she did not want to send students “outside” the institutional framework.
Do people feel compelled to keep adult learners within virtual walls of the LMS? What’s your view of open curricula and open learning?
You’d have to imagine that ‘most’ people coming here will want to be lowering those sorts of barriers wouldn’t you? This is billed as an open course after all.
Lots of people will still feel more comfortable inside those kinds of constraints, both teachers and learners (and managers!), but it’s not for me. It is saying all the wrong things; you only learn when I present you with the opportunity and the material, learning is something that happens in isolation and is not part of everyday, and, to be brutally honest, I don’t have time to scour the world looking for the best resources. I will happily curate what I do come across, but I’d rather have a huge team of learners pulling in the same direction, finding resources, sharing, communicating and getting used to the idea that learning happens all the time.
I’m not good enough to take the role of the ‘sage on the stage’, but I can do my best to help people learn from each other.
Yeah. It’s billed as an “open course” but who knows what people think that means.
MOOC means “massively open” but no one seems to agree about what “open” means. Last month I participated on Bruno LaTour’s “mooc” on scientific humanities on the French platform, FUN. That was a walled course in many ways… you couldn’t even get onto it if you missed the deadline… very worthwile but very top down… too.
And, even people who say that open means something more like what this course is aiming at can have a lot of trouble following through with this in the classroom. It’s an emotional struggle for many of us to let go of our students, to trust them not to run amok. I did this in my class and sometimes there was so much noise, people doing whatever they wanted, watching videos, Facebooking, chatting about football or politics… that I had to tell them, “Look, this is really hard for me… ” but eventually they calmed down and so did I and it started to work.
Online, of course, means that we do not have nearly the same control as we do onground, and I think this is one of the reasons why many “don’t trust” the format. They don’t trust students… how can you when you have been socialized into a teaching culture that is built on distrust and suspicion of students.
So, designing an open course means that you design for trust. Before you do that you need to be able to trust students. Every one has emotions. We can’t blame them for this. So how do we move from this twisted culture of paranoid suspicion to something that is open in the sense of trusting and free?
I don’t think trust is so much of a problem. In my time we used to read magazines hiding under our desks when we didn’t think the lecture was interesting. Now it’s easier to access those distractions and it might even look that you are working while you are actually catching up with friends or watching a movie!
I think the key in any class (with or without technology) is “engagement” and giving students the skills to follow the path that will lead them to learning.
Taking part of this MOOC makes me realise how motivated and structured you need to be as a student to take make the most of this kind of learning experience.
I am happy to work with open resources, though given context of HE and achievement linked to outcomes I guess this is not the same as open curricula. As for open learning, I am happy to have people work outside the walls of the VLE/LMS though it can make tracking what’s going on more difficult at the lowest “web analystics” level.
But this just means we have to raise our game and design learning activities that engage people, that they can plug into any which way, and which we can use to track what’s going on.
Hey Guy,
I’m interested in the distinction between open resources and open curricula. What kind of outcomes do you think could be linked to an open curriculum? I’m a language teacher so our outcomes can be quite wobbly at times. While some colleagues insist on drawing lines in the sand – they are also the ones that complain most about students.
For me, open resources are the things people can access without signing up for a course. An open curricula would be whatever you want to make it, independent of a course/institution/set of learning outcomes.
Thinking about it, there is obviously a half way house between open and closed curricula which is typically where post graduate, research based degrees come in. The formal curriculum and learning outcomes are related to the development of research skills but the actual content of the research is whatever you can get someone to supervise. The more recent, natural extension to this would be personalised, possibly worked-based, learning built around an individual learning agreement.
In a language context, I guess an open curriculum might be whatever grammar, vocab and practice you need to be able to get done what you want to do in that language – whether it is access people, literature, content that you are interested in, or at a higher level be able to work or study or pass yourself off as a native in another country.