QUESTIONS: What will the future of higher education look like? What impact will the open education movement have? How will we get there from here? What will be the effects of open education movement upon K-12 education? What will be the effects of open education movement upon high school education? What role can OERs play in developing countries?
Those are tough questions to answer! One needs much knowledge about the current state of things (politically, economically, culturally) in order to make safe predictions of the future.
After reading Dr. Wiley's document (2005 - 2012: the OpenCourseWars) I had the impression that some points were difficult for him, as well - and he knows far much more than anyone else, since he has extense experience in the field.
Another thing: even before Dr. Wiley mentioned how critics would feel about his US-centric discussion, I had already formulated this notion in my mind. :-) The whole text seemed apocalyptic for me and evolved around american myths - war, terrorists etc. It was fun for the most part, but I felt that it was a little too much sometimes.
Well, I can only hope that the future (this word that we use for time that will come after the present, but we just do not know "when") does not take any longer than 2012. But it might. When one deals with "the system" and depends on the actions of others, it gets almost impossible to predict when things will happen. I also hope that a war does not get started, but I agree that changes do not happen without much disagreement and struggle.
The beginning of the text talks about the consortium of universities in the USA and also about the top universities around the globe that will engage in similar activities. I find it difficult for this to happen withing the time frame proposed by the text. I even find it hard to happen the way that it is pictured, first of all (despite Utah's seminal initiatives). I think that there is a long way to go before there is fair awareness of the potentials of openness in education. There is even a longer way to go before the universities work with such openness withing their institutional structure. Can you imagine getting around the bureaucracy? I think that by 2012 educators who believe in open education will still be working a lot in order to spread the notion of open education and to untangle the misconceptions in the area - for higher education institutions as well as for k-12 systems.
The text talked a lot about how market will influence open education initiatives, but I did not see much discussion about how pedagogical practices will change - except for the MetaU and the Learner Support (which for me was a little disturbing). The notion that learners will be more participative and will "trib" a lot seems to be pretty fair. But I do not believe that the LearnerSupport (something like a customer service) will arise. At least not in terms of market regulation as the text suggests. Only because there are learning needs that cannot be satisfied outside the learner's culture. Learning needs context.
Having Brazil in mind - and jumping to the last question - I am sure that Open Education still has a long way to go there. I will give an example: I work for a Federal University there (I am on a leave for my PhD) and implementing online undergraduate courses for it took almost a decade. This happened because faculty members do not have the culture of online education and need to debate a lot before agreeing on something. Then the decisions need voting, approval of diverse instances etc before they really get implemented. I am not against discussion, but I only want to make it clear how hard it is to make things move.
The notion of a LearnerSupport that can be based anywhere in the globe also would not be accepted in Brazil - for the reasons that I already expressed. I believe that online learning communities are much more feasible. Instead of reaching for outside support, learners will seek support among their peers - this is the trend that Brazil is working towards right now. And I also believe that this works much more in harmony with the idea of "trib". Instead of having a cold Learner Support, learners will help each other and develop responsibility towards their own learning process. Who know if Open Education will make this happen - finally?
Domingo, 25 de Novembro de 2007
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Your last part states that “Instead of having a cold Learner Support, learners will help each other and develop responsibility towards their own learning process.” I can’t agree this idea much because open education does not mean none support provided, like this class we are taking now--not 100 percent open education course; but we can see we get lots of support from the people around the world no matter they are registered for this class or not. We feel the supports are warm and cheerful, not colder than the support from the peers around us.
I agree with the levels of bureaucracy stopping anything major from changing at the universities. It seems like even minor changes take at least a year to implement, and if you want to do something major you start getting committees and subcommittees involved, which don't exactly make things run faster.
Hey! I was convinced that we in Italy had the mondial primacy of bureaucracy but I see it's a very common problem!
I'm especially surprised by the Rob's comment that I too could have written, with the very same words, for describing the Italian situation.
In these cases, we in Italy say: "tutto il mondo è paese" ("it's a small world")!
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