Open Teaching
Also used in the competing sense: = courses that allow external access and participation by non-registered students. See: Open Lessons
Definition
A working definition by Alec Couros:
"Open teaching is described as the facilitation of learning experiences that are open, transparent, collaborative, and social. Open teachers are advocates of a free and open knowledge society, and support their students in the critical consumption, production, connection, and synthesis of knowledge through the shared development of learning networks.
Typical activities of open teachers may include some or all of the following:
- Advocacy and use of free and/or open source tools and software wherever possible and beneficial to student learning;
- Integration of free and open content and media in teaching and learning;
- Promotion of copyleft content licenses for student content production/publication/dissemination;
- Facilitation of student understanding regarding copyright law (e.g., fair use/fair dealing, copyleft/copyright);
- Facilitation and distributed scaffolding of student personal learning networks for collaborative and sustained learning;
- Development of learning environments that are reflective, responsive, student-centred, and that incorporate a diverse array of instructional and learning strategies;
- Modeling of openness, transparency, connectedness, and responsible copyright/copyleft use and licensing; and,
- Advocacy for the participation and development of collaborative gift cultures in education and society."
(http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/1335)
Description
From the Open Education Primer:
"Open teaching is where the teacher invites the world into his classroom, an idea that is explored in more detail in Emily Senger’s article on Massively Open Online Courses.
Someone who has been involved in open teaching and open courses from the very beginning is Stephen Downes. A frizzy haired researcher and former philosophy professor, Downes works for the National Research Council of Canada out of Moncton, New Brunswick. He’s been involved in the field of online learning since 1995 where he worked with now charmingly defunct technologies like Telnet, text-based interfaces and CD-ROMs.
Downes has written programs using punch cards and used room-sized mainframe computers in the late 70s. He’s an early adopter, signing up for massive email courses in the 90s where he learned system administration and email networking basics. The man is a bona-fide geek.
Senger’s article goes into far more detail about MOOCs, but the approach behind them is intriguing enough to deserve a brief mention here as well. An open course that Downes and Siemens created was called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. It was a regular credit class at the University of Manitoba with 25 real-live students and 2300 online participants.
“The idea hasn’t really penetrated the mass mind yet. Universities aren’t calling me up to teach these classes, they’re asking him to come and talk about them because they’re curious,” says Downes. “The model has a core of people taking the class for credit but that core is working openly with a much larger body of people who are taking it out of interest.”
Taking a class purely out of interest? In a goal-driven culture raised on gold stars and crossing things off various to-do lists, this might seem like a tough sell.
Of the 2300 students 200 were active participants. An active participant is someone who publishes material or participates in the online discussions. The rest were lurkers, receiving daily updates.
This ratio of active participants to lurkers resembles the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80-20 rule where roughly 80 per cent of effects come from 20 per cent of the causes.
Siemens had an interesting take on the participation rates. “It was more 90-10 and of that 10 per cent it was probably 1 per cent that were really active. However, we did find that people who took one course were more likely to participate and be more active in new courses.”
Is participating in one of these open classes a skill you should teach, or is the 80-20 rule just a reality of social systems? Siemens believes that more time should be spent on educating the public about this kind of interaction (think of what would happen in Youtube or newspaper comments) but acknowledges the veracity of the 80-20 rule.
Open teaching is a little more revolutionary than open content, but it’s not too far out there. Are students and teachers better off when they open up the learning process and allow interested parties to participate? Can classrooms turn into a place where the contributions of all learners are mashed up into something that is greater than the whole? With our society becoming a more open and transparent one, why keep what happens within a classroom stuck within those walls? (http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/2010/09/an-open-education-primer/)
Discussion
Alec Couros:
"Through the guiding principles of open teaching, students are able to gain requisite skills, self-efficacy, and knowledge as they develop their own personal learning networks (PLNs). Educators guide the process using their own PLNs, with a variety of teaching/learning experiences, and via (distributed) scaffolding. Knowledge is negotiated, managed, and exchanged. A gift economy may be developed through the paying-forward of interactions and meaningful collaborations.
In the digital and rich-media environment, educators may also take on different roles, metaphors that extend beyond “sage on the stage”, “guide on the side”, etc. The “network sherpa” (source?) may be a suitable metaphor to describe these pedagogical processes.
This metaphor projects the role of teacher as one who “knows the terrain”, helps to guide students around obstacles, but who is also led by student interests, objectives, and knowledge. The terrain in this case consists of the development of media literacy (critique & awareness), social networks (connections), and connected/connective knowledge.
As with any models/images/diagrams/metaphors there are always limitations and (outright) flaws. Yet, I present these three pieces (i.e., working definition of open teaching, thinning the walls, network sherpa) in hope that it will lead us to a discussion on some of the perceived changes in teaching & learning in the wider scope of education" (http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/1335)