Ive worked in distance education for a lot of my life and that has necessarily entailed using a lot of technology: TV and radio, print, video and audio cassettes, telephone and post, laservision discs(!), CDs, First Class, Blackboard, Moodle, YouTube, Flickr and Wikis. I sympathise instinctively with the kinds of de-institutionalisation ideas expressed by Ivan Illich (Illich, I. (1973). Deschooling Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin. First published by Harper and Row 1971; now republished by Marion Boyars.) Yet the kinds of learning experiences I have constructed have been carefully crafted, taking care to define the intended learning outcomes and to link these explicitly to the learning activities and assessment and feedback. So in actual fact they have been quite teacher-centric in the way they have defined what the learner should be learning. Of course that doesn’t exclude learners from using the prompts Ive provided in other ways, to learn whatever they like, but nevertheless such carefully crafted packages seem antithetical to the philosophy I instinctively feel is right and so my “big question” is where should the balance lie between learner guidance and learner freedom? I guees an obvious answer is that it all depends on the learner: their confidence, preferred learning style, previous experience and knowledge etc. but that answer doesn’t feel terribly useful. I signed up for this MOOC because it seemed quite open ended and I m hoping that by experiencing it, it might help me to answer my question, or help to better understand how to improve the question.
Ex-OU, EX-BT Distance Learning. Currently Visiting Fellow Centre for Distance Education, University of London , Head of School of Media and Communication, De Montfort University, Leicester and Professor of Learning Technologies.