Open Education - The Future

The Future

Open education is considered to be a revolutionary approach to the future of education. This critical evolution of instruction could have the potential to create a global population that has access to rich material and incredible resources worldwide. At this crossroads is the intent to actively address real-life issues while preparing for the ever-changing, complex world of technology. In order for Open Education to be realized it must be publicly supported and publicly good. The fundamental design of Open Education intends to produce a threefold educational experience that combines learning/research, communication and collaboration, and the ability to share findings with a specific population. This transformation will impact the way people learn and the way research is obtained. The openness of education is drawing immediate attention as it will act as a necessary catalyst for social development and as an agent of change. The future of Open Education redirects the flow of education from experts to students to reflect the intrinsic motivation of the student in their learning process. Advocates of Open Education are contemplating how their learning experience should look like and then act in an individualized manner to construct a personalized educational experience. The ‘original’ Open University in the UK was founded on four key principles: being Open to People, Open to Places, Open to Methods and Open to Ideas. As the movement has grown, so have the ideals behind it. Empire State College even has an ‘open curriculum’ allowing students to design their own degree course.

With the realization of 'open curriculum,' the classic idea that people will move to a place of learning, dedicate a fixed amount of time to learning, and come out with a specialized qualification shaped by local expertise is certainly no longer the only option. Tremendous growth in universities marks the late 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, while at the same time Internet connections have facilitated a move toward distance learning. Even more significant changes are happening in the world of information, however. Internet systems are causing us to question the value of personal knowledge and to establish new measures of shared and self-published information that has not been judged by conventional academic systems.

Predictions on the relatively new subject of Open Education are proportionately unknown; especially being the future of this design is strongly influenced by student demand as well as contributions by intrinsically motivated organizations, universities, and learners. A three-year project funded by the Technology Enhanced Learning Program on Personal Inquiry: Designing for Evidence-Based Inquiry Learning across Formal and Informal Settings (PI), jointly conducted by Open University and the University of Nottingham, examined the way the classroom environment is integrating technology, blurring the distinction between formal lessons, and supplementing instruction with more informal leisure time activities. The focus is on how to help students learn the skills of evidence-based inquiry supported by technology across formal and informal settings. Technology, and mobile technology in particular, offers interesting ways of supporting the transitions made by learners across settings, for example between classrooms and after-school clubs, or between in-school working and working in the field.

As Open Education continues to grow, open and free technology tools will be a critical component. Studio work and virtual work will become the dominating portion of curriculum instruction. MIT, a leading University that has been working with Open Education, OpenCourseWare, for over 10 years is planning to focus in the upcoming years on four major areas: Sharing OpenCourseWare everywhere, which entails making the course work easy to find, adapting the material to various distribution methods and new approaches to reaching under-served populations; Serving Key Audiences specifically high school students and independent learners; Creating Open Learning Communities where learners can collaborate together on similar topics; Empowering Educators Worldwide.

Open Education students have a wide availability to tremendous resources and their content should reflect this vast availability to knowledge. The primary target for Open Education Students is for them to be curators of knowledge; similar to a museum curator seeking the appropriate resources to produce their desired result. Open approaches are rather different, as content can come from many sources; the main opportunity may lie not in being a producer of content but rather in being an effective user and supporter of learners using such content. Once a significant amount of material is available, then skills in bringing together good patterns or designs for learning and connecting them with assessment and accreditation will be extremely valuable.

As Open Education continues to spread, a number of issues need to be addressed, including perennial copy-right concerns. Publishers, who have been able to monopolize to some extent the production of educational materials, are increasingly up-in-arms, as governments cut costs through Open Educational Resources. Simultaneously, as Open Educational Resources spread, it is increasingly difficult to monitor quality, particularly if adapted when delivered. With regard to secondary education, younger people may require more contact hours than for which open education may provide. http://www.unescobkk.org/education/ict/online-resources/databases/ict-in-education-database/item/article/the-future-of-open-education-with-sir-john-daniel-1/

There is no easy answer as to how Open Education will operate in this new world, though it seems unlikely that a face-to-face fixed location model can respond as effectively as other models. Especially since there is a chance for start-ups and expanding education in the developing world to jump a generation and build more efficient and useful ways to support those for whom lifelong learning will be a necessity. The expanding model of Open Education has done one thing without equivocation; it has caused a debate to emerge to rethink the future of education.

• Closed vs Open Education

The New York Times has decided to charge readers for accessing their information on-line, no longer making it an “open education” site. When users visit the New York Times site, they are greeted with a window that asks them to pay for a subscription to the information. The Times felt as though they would make more money charging for their on-line newspaper, estimating that 1.2 million people would access the on-line site. One in four people actually paid for the subscription and those that receive the hard copy newspaper were also granted on-line access with their paid subscription. This ends up being only about 165,000 on-line readers, compared to the 1.2 million the site was planning to generate. What does this mean for open education? Open education sites are more likely to receive on-line traffic as there are vast amounts of quality information that people are able to access for free, thus open education. Open education sites are able to sustain themselves with advertising due to the large amounts of traffic these free websites filled with information generate. http://www.openeducation.net/category/search-information-access/