I participated in an interesting meeting of the Athabasca University Academic Council (our senate equivalent) this morning and the most contentious item concerned our option for ‘challenge for credit” alternative, that is offered in most of our undergraduate programs.
By way of background, Athabasca undergrad programs are offered as continuous enrollment and mostly self study programs that follow the old correspondence model. We offer support from an individual tutor, a study guide (that roughly serves as an interpretation of the study materials), a FEW interactive options (little used) via Moodle and a course pack that typically consists of a reading package and a text or two. Students are given 6 months (can be extended with $$$ to a year), as much access (phone and email) as they want to an assigned tutor, tutor marked assignments and an invigilated exam. We have recently been offering ‘optional’ networking and support via our elgg based social networking system (the Athabasca Landing) but the take up by tutors, faculty and students has (to date) been modest.
Credit for challenge (as opposed to seat time or completion of course activities), is an old idea first institutionalized by the University of London in the 19th century. Read More
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Tag: OERs
Quality of Open Educational Resources
Tony Bates opened the preverbial can of worms, when he dared to talk about the good, bad and ugly of OER’s in a recent post. We’ve found trying to orchestrate debates on this topic, that anyone willing to say anything against OERs must either be employed by a commercial publisher or someone who hates both Motherhood and orphaned fawns. But Tony took a good crack at it, and my colleague Rory McGreal couldn’t help responding. I mostly agree with Rory’s points, probably because as the new UNESCO chair in Open Educational Resources, he has been preaching that gospel at me for a long time. But I wanted to add a few comments of my own.Read More
Even with Information glut, we need Open Education Resources
What Brian Lamb seems to confuse in this entry about the Open Education Resources, universities and information scarcity argument is that information (or more accurately a surfeit of data) available on the net does not equate to a surplus of quality learning content.
Quality learning content charts a path through complex issues, ideas and problems creating learning moments and activities. Early distance education theorists including Borje Holmberg wrote about “guided didactic interaction” by which he meant a style of writing, that engaged in simulated dialogue with the learner(s). This style is unlike the academic prose common in scholarly articles and the technical writing of advanced manuals, technical specifications and or popular press prose that is readily available on the net. It attempts to capture the personal motivation and excitement of the teacher to create the motivation often necessary to support learners through difficult content. Today, the learning conversations expand to simulations, games, web explorations, and even realtime and asynchronous conversations among learners. A skillful teacher creates these paths and simultaneously scaffolds learners new to the discipline and its associated discourse.
We do not have a surfeit of such learning content on the Net today. OERs are beginning to make a contribution to this effort. Properly licensed (read Creative Commons, with derivatives allowed) OER’s also allow other educators and learners to contextualize, mash, translate and republish this specialized content, thus creating an ever expanding and infinitely malleable resources. I write this note from Brazil where students regularly attend formal courses and engage in informal learning without the support of quality textbooks and the Net resources often bundled with these expensive textbooks. OERs offer the possibility of sharing not only the open access resource of research and scholarly content, but as well the expertise and passion of educators who are skilled at helping learners. We need more of these resources not constraints or misinformed criticism of the OER promise to increase access and public knowledge.