Archive for the ‘Distance learning’ Category

Here is David Wiley’s summary of early discussions in his Open Education class, which is just getting under way. As a review, David’s teaching this class completely on line and completely open to anyone. You can just participate at no cost, or if you are in school, you can sign sign up for credit through your university.

One of the questions under discussion early is “In your opinion, is the ‘right to education’ a basic human right? Why or why not?” I’m interested to see if anyone argues the negative here. It’s kind of like asking if a clean, safe environment is a basic human right. Well, yes, but that’s not what is going to stop us all from burning fossil fuels. Not only does failing to educate everyone leave a great many people disempowered, which itself can be dangerous, it deprives us all of a part of the human creativity we will need if we are to survive as a species. We need to educate everyone because everyone deserves an education of course, but we need to educated everyone because ultimately, it’s probably the only way we can all live togehter. I see Open Education as a green movement for the mind.

Here’s another memo from Pew’s Internet & American Life project, which is actually about China. The numberrs when it comes to China always stagger me. The report predicts strong growth in Internet usage in China, where currently only ten percent of the population is online. As detailed below, the demography is interesting:

In China, just over 10% of the population uses the internet, according to the latest government accounting. Users are relatively young, male, urban, and are disproportionately composed of students. Just over 70% of the user population is under age 30 and almost 60% are men. The penetration rate in urban areas is about 20%, compared with just over 3% in rural areas. Among occupations, students make up nearly a third of Chinese internet users, and business workers account for 30% more. The rest are a mixture of self-employed, non-profit workers, the unemployed, teachers, government workers, and army personnel. Peasants or farmers account for only about 0.4% of the online population.

China is already an important piece of the open educational resources movement, with projects like CORE sharing vast amounts of educational materials created natively in Chinese and translated to Chinese from other languages. The influx of new Chinese users will no doubt transform the Internet as a whole (as Pew predicts), but given the enormity of the educational challenges there, I expect the impact on open and distance education to be even more pronounced.

A timely article in govtech.com today about just the point I was making. India has gotten into the open education arena with a project announced by NPTEL that shares courses which are designed for independent online learning. NPTEL is the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, and here is their description of the project from their site:

The main objective of NPTEL program is to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses. This is being carried out by IITs (Seven), IISc Bangalore and other premier institutions as a collaborative project. At IIT Madras, the project is evolving and it is our intent to provide learning materials, digitally taped classroom lectures, supplementary materials and links to state-of-the art research materials in every subject possible. Currently samples from approximately 70 courses offered by faculty in various departments and to students at all levels (B.Tech, M.Tech, M.S., M.Sc., Ph.D.) are given here. Approximately 140 courses are in various stages of preparation and distribution through internet.

This is a great illustration of how institutions with different focuses create OERs of different flavors. Most OCWs create sites containing materials for classroom-based instruction, but there are several great examples now of institutions with expertise in distance learning that are producing materials that support independent online learning–including OU UK’s OpenLearn project, UC Irvine’s OCW, and now NPTEL’s site.

When I wrote recently about influences on the open educational resources movement, I discussed educational technology from the perspective of the learning object concept only.  Since then, I’ve felt the need to circle back and say that the whole concept of distance learning has a strong influence on the OER movement as well.  Many people have come into the field with an interest and background in distance learning, and others from the perspective of sharing materials from classroom based courses.

Most OCWs are examples of open sharing of classroom-based materials, where no assumption is made that the materials by themselves are sufficient to support independent learning.  Other projects, such as CMU’s Open Learning Initiative are specifically designed to support independent online learning.  Understanding the perspective of particular project on this issue can also be helpful in understanding how the resources can best be used.