Open_Ed assignments for week 5: Example Open Education Projects
What do these representative open education projects have in common? What differentiates them? In the context of open education projects, what does "quality" mean?
The websites I have analyzed in the assignments for this week give free access to learning materials about a great variety of subjects. Some of them require a free registration, others do not need it to give access to the learning materials. Some works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, others have some rights reserved or are protected by copyright laws. There are many differences among these websites, ranging from the kind of access to the learning tools available for the learners until the content organization. Some websites are just a collection of links to external resources where not all the resources are free. In the Open Training Platform website, the link to the language courses takes to an Italian website for English as foreign language learners that provides ESL courses and accommodation in Britain. Other projects, such as the National Repository of Online Courses, offer nice courses on some subjects based on audio-video-text centered lessons, but the quality of the videos is, for example, questionable from the pedagogical point of view, because many of these videos just focus on the teacher’s face while he/she is explaining the lesson: instead of the cloze-up of the teacher, that adds nothing to the understanding of the lesson, I would have liked to see the teacher’s face only for some seconds and then a set of slides that summarize the main points of the lesson. Some notes, a picture, a graph would help understanding, the teacher’s face is not so effective as a set of explicatory slides. This is just the reason why, as a foreign language teacher, I have always preferred audio-podcasts to video-podcasts, because I am not technologically skilled enough to create a video-podcast by the use of a screen capture software. I am convinced that the students would get bored or tired by seeing my face on the video. The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University is more traditional in the approach to its open learning courses, aimed at helping their students learn particular subjects at the introductory college level, but as far as I know no assessment for the completion of the courses is provided. From this point of view, the MIT Open CourseWare is more complete. Apart from the wide range of courses offered on any subject, there is at least the possibility of giving a feedback on the quality of the learning experience. But the quality of a course cannot be measured only focusing the attention on the course material, just in the same way as you cannot judge the quality of a school just considering the building and the books that have been adopted in its courses. The quality of a school is evaluated on the basis of the achievements of its students, and these achievements are assessed during their learning experience on a formative basis and at the end of their educational experience. For this reason, I have appreciated LearningSpace very much. Apart from the quality of its learning material (that I cannot judge because I am not an expert), there a self-learner can really have the opportunity to individualize his/her own learning process by the use of such tools as the Compendium (it fosters visual thinking), myLearningSpace, Edit my profile. At the same time, cooperation and social interaction are encouraged by such tools as the Learning Journal, fora, instant messaging, flash meetings. Besides, the learners are constantly guided (but not assessed) during their learning process, as we can see in this example:
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Unfortunately, however, it is impossible to understand how much a learner can effectively achieve from these courses because there are neither entry tests, nor intermediate tests, nor final tests are provided to assess the learners’ achievements. In other words, I do not see a kind of quality control that is present, instead, in Connexions. Connexions is very rich (at last there are some materials in my mother-tongue language!!!) and flexible in its offer of learning materials. The materials recall the philosophy of the learning objects, the educational material being made of "small knowledge chunks…that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc." There is a high level of interoperability not only on the side of the learners, but also as regards the authors and the instructors who can create, collaborate and share these materials freely, personalizing their own courses and optimizing the resources available. I have also appreciated a new content selection feature very much, the so called "Lensing".
"Lenses enable both organizations and individuals to give their stamps of approval to content in the Connexions repository, allowing for user-driven quality control of Connexions modules and collections. Through these lenses, Connexions users can also provide their own tags and descriptions for items in the repository."
The general impression I get from this week’s assignment that I have shared with my Italian colleagues from the LTEver community involved in this course, (a particular thank you to Alessandro Giorni, Emanuela Zibordi, Andreas Formiconi and Antonio Fini for their contributions), is that more attention should be focused on the learners, on their characteristics, their needs, their learning styles, their motivation, their final achievements to fit the content of the various courses for them. Without considering this important part of the educational contract, namely the social interaction, the assessment of the quality of any open education project is impossible. As Marion wrote in a comment on a post by Karen, "it is very easy to get focused on other things, and forget that at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is the learner."
