August 11, 2008
Professor Proposes Taking Open Education Beyond Posting Course Materials
These days many professors make their lecture materials — and even recordings of their class sessions — free online for anyone beyond the campus to learn from. But a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas hopes to try to offer even more of his course to a wider audience this fall by allowing outsiders to participate in course discussions online.
“Serious, you can just take this class for free,” wrote the professor, David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the university, on a post on his blog AcademHack. The course is a graduate seminar on “Networked Knowledge,” and Mr. Parry had already planned to make recordings of class sessions available online. But he’s now offering to hold a weekly online discussion group by video chat for those tuning in remotely as well. “Think of it as a more formalized reading group,” he said.
Those auditing the course who aren’t enrolled won’t get any credit, though. “The knowledge is free, the degree will cost you money,” he wrote.
He cautioned that he might not be able to pull off his proposed experiment in open education, but that he hopes 5 to 10 people will take him up on the offer — and keep up with the assigned readings.
Mr. Parry made news earlier this year for experimenting with Twitter in his courses. In an interview on Monday, Mr. Parry said that he got the idea to open up his course after a couple of graduate students from other institutions contacted him via Twitter saying they would love to take his course, which he had been writing about on a blog.
He predicts that it will take him an extra couple of hours per week to do the online discussion group, but that it would be worth his time. “I get a lot back from this in that I’m really interested in the future of education,” he said.
Have others already tried allowing outsiders into online course discussions? Should professors open their classroom doors even wider online? —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Monday August 11, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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And, most importantly, will legislators and university administrators allow free courses?
— Joe Aug 11, 03:23 PM #
This is exactly the kind of thing that we are preparing for over at NIXTY (www.nixty.com). OpenTeach is clearly the next iteration. It started w/OpenCourseWare, then OpenAccess, and next, we hope, is OpenTeach. You can read more here:
http://nixty.com/blog/2008/05/18/opencourseware-openaccessopenteach/
Also, Stephen Downes and George Siemens have an open course on Connectivism that they are teaching with something like 1,000 students (both enrolled and non-enrolled). You can read more on the course blog here:
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/
— Glen Moriarty Aug 11, 05:30 PM #
One might ask why he needs to run a discussion group, is it a holdover of face-to-face classes? Work by Gibbons, et al, using video of lectures shows self-moderated small group discussion among the learners produced better results than the control group of students in the lecture; might student-led discussions be similar? Downes and Seimens look to be launching a larger scale experiment that seems to carry fewer of the QWERTY assumptions about a course.
— Nils Peterson Aug 11, 05:33 PM #
I opened up my Graduate course in much the way described here, January 2008. EC&I 831 regularly had attendance from dozens of participants not enrolled in the course, but who interacted both synchronously and asynchronously with enrolled students. The course is open, and can be found online at http://eci831.wikispaces.com .
— Alec Couros Aug 11, 07:42 PM #
I teach a class on social media for PR which requires students to blog about course related material. Students’ blog posts are expected to initiate conversations not just among their peers, but also among people outside the class. As a result we’ve had textbook authors, company CEOs, corporate representatives, PR professionals, and educators from other universities join our online discussions. These “outsiders” have contributed greatly to the class by providing new insights and sometimes even challenging our perspective. I strongly believe that tearing down the physical walls of our classroom has made the learning experience more relevant and engaging for my students – and myself.
— Corinne Weisgerber Aug 11, 08:55 PM #
I did the same with one of my course “Information Technology Tools for Engineers” at http://infotechtools.ning.com.
The course allowed guests/visitors to join in and participate with no credit for the course. The enrolled student’s work was graded and they also received a grade.
— Javed Alam Aug 12, 02:49 AM #
Have others already tried allowing outsiders into online course discussions? Should professors open their classroom doors even wider online?
I applaud all promotion of open classrooms – see http://openeducationnews.org/ However, it is important to note that Dr. Parry’s efforts to open up his classroom are far from unique. While most chug along unheralded, countless innovative educators from K-12 to higher ed and beyond are opening up their classrooms to the world through live classroom webcasts, open wikis, blogs, etc.
— Jennifer Maddrell Aug 12, 02:45 PM #
Open classrooms are not new. I went through the Master Program at Yale in archeology 1968-70. I received the knowledge I wanted, but because I paid nothing I received nothing but the knowledge. I was thrilled the Yale faculty was open to the idea.
— Ellenda Wulfestieg Aug 13, 08:04 PM #
Taking classes online give others opportunities which may not have. Like foreign students, etc
A good example of courses taken online is the OpenWetWare Courses section
— Ricardo Vidal Aug 14, 01:41 AM #