September 26, 2008
More 'Open Teaching' Courses, and What They Could Mean for Colleges
Last month we wrote about a professor’s experiment in “open teaching,” in which he allowed anyone to take his online course and fully participate in discussions. Since then readers have alerted us to at least three other experiments in open teaching, in what appears to be a growing movement.
- More than 2,000 people have signed up to be informal students in an online course on “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” taught by Stephen Downes, a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, and George Siemens, associate director of research and development at University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre. Students can add to a course blog and a wiki, and read highlights on a daily e-mail newsletter. At least one day a week, everyone can tune in and ask questions during a multimedia Webcast. Think radio call-in show with professors as hosts, says Mr. Downes. Twenty-four students have enrolled to take the course for credit through the University of Manitoba.
- In January some 200 students informally followed a course by Alec Couros, information and communication technology coordinator for the School of Education at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan, called “Open, Connected, Social.” Mr. Couros said his motivation was to practice using various social-networking tools and to see if it was possible to use Web 2.0 to make it easier to teach more students online than would otherwise be feasible. “I’m trying to get an idea of what it would take to be a network teacher,” he said.
- And a handful of informal students joined an open-education course taught last fall by David Wiley, then a professor at Utah State University and now at Brigham Young University. He admitted that managing the additional students, and grading their papers, was “a healthy amount of extra work — probably double what I would have spent marking anyway.” But he felt like professors should consider the work part of the service component of their jobs.
What are the implications of open teaching for colleges? I provide my take in the first installment of a new Chronicle column called College 2.0. The mission of the column is “exploring how new technologies are changing colleges,” and I’d love to hear ideas for topics to tackle in future installments. —Jeffrey R. Young
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Buddha walked and talked among the people, teaching those who would listen. It is a pretty old model, to collaborate…lairning!
Tech makes it possible to span distance but communicate. The oral tradition, however, will always be a feature of human exchange.
— mnh Sep 26, 03:27 PM #
My current research indicates that the 78 million Baby-Boomers and the 75 million Millennials generation [of 131 million working tax-payers in the U.S.] have very different orientations towards Library services and information access and usage. The resistance of older library system personnel as well as corporate America illustrates the ‘lag’ between the two entities world view and technology differences.
I am trying to not only chronicle this for academic purpose, but to allow SJSU to act as the premier entity it is in advancing change, adapting to technology and being the trail-blazers in innovation as Silicon Valley is known for. This is not a new or untested phenomenon, but people, cultures [library and other], age groups, anthropology issue and societal context need the balance of the ‘pioneers & homesteaders’ [see my SJSU SlisLife Blog Entry Web 2.0]. In chronicling this change, the resistance to new, more adept, efficient online access tools and the threat that represent to brick & mortar libraries that need not exist.
If the needs of library patrons are met with the needs of the community [see my SJSU SlisLife Blog “Funding Libraries is not Rocket Science”] then the survival and actual thriving of library systems as functional bridges between the needs of the two generations and their habits, attitudes and ability to access information and library systems is assured.
Top-down Org. ‘A’ management [Beaucratic] vs. horizontal type ‘B’ Org.’s [Flat – Friedman “The World is Flat”] type information access behaviors are exhibited by the rapid change and impact to global geo-political structures of economics, politics and global resource utilization.
Your group training can not only be aimed at ‘boomers’ who have not come up under these structures and may find them disorienting, but can help facilitate millennial’s learning curve in working in Japanese-like societal work groups [The Japanese conquered our Car & Electrical industries by implementing Peter Drucker-like TQM ideologies that the U.S. rejected, now we need to adapt to their work-group ethics that match distributed global work force deployment.
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlevents/duck-etal05.pdf
Conclusion
Since this survey was concluded, a number of independent initiatives have been implemented at the University of Pittsburgh that may address millennial’s’ expectations as discussed in the professional literature.
• To facilitate searching of library databases, the University of Pittsburgh Library System implemented Zoom! a search engine allowing users to search many databases across different platforms and a virtual intranet to access all library materials from off campus.
• On the local scene, the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg installed a soda pop machine in the lobby of the library. (Note: users were already permitted to bring covered drinks into the library; this just made it more convenient.)
• A number of regular events housed in the library help to market it as a site of activity and campus-connected content, not merely a repository for books and resource materials.
1. Since UPG students already seem to have a positive image of library staff members and several recent steps have been implemented to meet user expectations in the areas of “comfort and technology,
2. “it seems logical to focus on other areas.”
3. Over 50 percent of the respondents in this survey indicated that they found the online databases difficult to use.
4. It would therefore by appropriate for the library to review and improve library instructional efforts to meet user expectations in regard to online databases taking into account various characteristics of millennial’s mentioned in the literature, such as visual orientation to learning and a preference for team or group activities.
5. This is an area that will provide a continuing challenge for librarians at UPG and other academic libraries as they strive to meet the expectations of current and future library users.
1. Millennials definition of Millennials in the Free Online Encyclopedia.
Encyclopedia article about Millennials. Information about Millennials in the Columbia Encyclopedia, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, computing dictionary.
encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Millennials – 26k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
1. Millennials
Definition:. The millennials joining your workforce now are employees born between 1980 and 2000, or 1981 and 1999, depending on the author. …
humanresources.about.com/od/glossarym/g/millenials.htm – 22k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
1. Generation Y – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Generation Y, sometimes referred to as “Millennials, [1] “Echo Boomers”, …. One name sometimes used when referring to this group is “Millennials,” which …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y – 55k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
Marketing the Millennials:What They Expect From Their Library …
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – View as HTML
Millennials before they arrive in full force.” 6. The Millennials. A definition of the generations and statistics related to. millennials is problematic. …
www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlevents/duck-etal05.pdf – Similar pages – Note this
by PM Duck – 2002 – Related articles – All 7 versions
1. Millennials Demand Changes in IT Strategy
Sep 22, 2008 … Generation Y workers are starting to demand the corporate IT managers provide access to instant messaging tools and a variety of Web 2.0 …
www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=326407
Labeled Articles
1. Generation X and The Millennials: What You Need to Know About …
Just beginning to enter the workplace, The Millennial Generation was born between 1977 and 1998. The 75 million members of this generation are being raised …
www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/mgt08044.html – 17k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
— tim trevathan Sep 26, 07:16 PM #
http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring101/mentor101.htm
— Tyler Durden Sep 26, 10:16 PM #
Leigh Blackall is running a course called Facilitating online communities” from Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand & has about 100 informal students as well as his enrolled students: http://wikieducator.org/Facilitating_Online
— Sarah Stewart Sep 26, 10:47 PM #
Quick clarification – I am not delivering this course as an “education-technology consultant”. I don’t think I’ve ever used that term to define myself.
The course is being offered by University of Manitoba’s Extended Education Faculty. It’s part of a Certificate in Adult Education (and part of a proposed Certificate in Emerging Technologies for Learning). The course has two components: 1) recognized for-credit enrolled learners and 2) learners who take the course for personal interest, but don’t receive recognition and are not enrolled.
George
— George Siemens Sep 29, 04:00 PM #
The item has now been corrected… thanks.
— wired campus Sep 29, 05:30 PM #
Last summer I listened to a history course on Ancient Rome from Stanford on ITunes University. Since then, I listen to the lectures for other courses. I have also used the MIT Open University website to learn about new topics and get articles and reading lists. In fact, I selected my graduate field after researching areas on the MIT OU website to figure out where my interests would have an academic home (it’s a new field).
— Texas Sep 29, 06:06 PM #
more websites:
http://www.open.ac.uk/
http://oyc.yale.edu/
— Jeremy Oct 2, 11:46 PM #
Following up on the “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” online course, I found this link on www.elearnspace.org/blog, which is:
http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/con_ed/mpcp/cis/etl.shtml
— Jeremy Oct 13, 10:21 PM #