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Open learning - what is it?

In the fifth week of our ONL course we started exploring the benefits and challenges of openness in education. It was harder than I thought - what does openness mean?

In our PBL group we tried to present our understanding of openness and open education. Each of us saw it in a slightly different way: “open” can mean tolerant (e.g a person - open to new ideas), accessible (e.g. a shop open 24/7), available to everybody (eg. MOOCs), not paid (e.g a course free from costs), jointly made or open to modification (e.g Wikipedia), collaborative (e.g crowdsourced mapping), not restrictive (e.g. CC licenses), socially just and inclusive (e.g. taking into account various groups or cultures, not only the ones that were traditionally accepted), etc.


It was even harder to describe how open or how closed our own teaching was and what we could do to make it more "open". We asked ourselves "Do we want to be open?", " What are our fears related to openness?", "Is it always safe to be open?", "Do we have the right to share freely the content developed as part of our employment contract?"


There were so many perspectives presented and so many questions raised during our group meeting that I found it hard to stay focused and move forward. The webinar on the Nuances of Open Educational Practices (OEP) given by Maha Bali from the American University in Cairo, Egypt did not make things clearer. On the contrary, still new perspectives opened up as we explored diverse understandings of open educational practices along three continua: content/process centricity, teacher/student centricity and pedagogical/social justice focus. The webinar made me realize that there were still new unexplored interpretations of the word “open”.


Sharing and Openness


What helped me grapple with the concept of openness was our group's "fish" document (FISH - Focus, Investigate and Share). I read the comments made by my colleagues and tried to concentrate to find out what my own understanding of openness was. Having thought for a while, I can say that I understand openness in teaching, first of all, as giving equal access to education to different people and countries (countries that are underprivileged financially, culturally or politically; people who are physically disabled or have some deficits, e.g. hearing or vision loss, etc.). Access in a distance mode is easier, cheaper, and offers more affordances to mitigate the disabilities or the financial barriers. Open pedagogy also involves the learners in the design of the learning experience, so being OPEN also means listening to the needs of the participants of the learning experience and shaping the syllabus in such a way that those needs are met. Openness also involves sharing as all the learners bring in small pieces of their own experience, share them in class and build new qualities on top of their previous knowledge. So to sum up, to me OPEN means accessible, free or affordable, inclusive, and collaborative (at least to some degree).


Sharing is an important part of the Open Pedagogy. I experienced it first hand a few years ago when we started using Moodle in my Foreign Language Teaching Center. This LMS system was new to most of us, teachers, and our English language courses on Moodle were completely empty. We decided, as a team of 70 teachers, to develop the courses together rather than separately (the way we had developed our traditional textbook-based courses before) - this way we created very quickly an extensive database of exercises by sharing our resources, so that everybody had a better starting point when moving online. We saved a lot of time this way and could use it on exploring other functions of Moodle. In this context “open” meant collaboratively made and shared by everybody.


This experience of sharing paved a way to a closer collaboration at the Foreign Language Teaching Center at my uni. I would not say that it lead us to Open Learning or Open Pedagogy but it was one of the steps in the right direction.


Role of the Teacher


In the Open Learning Pedagogy (OLP) the role of the teacher is more that of a “guide on the side, not a sage on the stage”. I see it a bit like organizing a party where you offer some space, provide the theme and reason to meet, offer my help and support, but then let the participants bring in their favorite music, share the cakes they baked themselves, and discuss their experiences. In class there is always some overarching question we are exploring. In traditional settings all is driven by the teacher while OLP lets the students contribute more, as it is not based on the transmission of knowledge from the all-knowing expert to the ignorant recipients. In OLP there is more room for learning by doing and all is accompanied by reflection. I am still in kindergarten when it comes to collaborative learning, but I see the benefits of it and would like to exploit it more extensively in my classes.


“We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.” - John Dewey


Collaboration


I started to engage my students in Virtual Exchange (VE) in 2019 and I am doing my fifth VE project this year. This international collaborative practice is quite new in my country and I would like to promote it in my Foreign Language Teaching Center and at my university as such. I can see how much my students gain from those collaborative projects and I believe that together with some other colleagues we could move foreign language teaching at my uni to a higher level, make it more authentic and more motivating to our students.


VE goes beyond language skills - students also develop intercultural, collaboration and digital skills on the way. Therefore, VE or Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), as it is sometimes called, should be part of the curriculum - particularly today, when COVID-19 pandemic hindered physical mobility. I also see VE as an excellent opportunity for teachers to develop their teaching skills and to broaden their horizons

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