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  • Support Faculty Choice for Open Learning

    By Joshua Kim November 18, 2009 9:39 pm EST

    Brad Stone has an interesting piece "The Argument for Free Classes via iTunes" in today NYTimes. He reports that iTunesU now has ~250,000 individual classes available for download and that other platforms like YouTube.edu are experiencing dramatic growth.

    Across our campuses a vigorous debate is taking place about if and how we can make our learning materials and educational product available and open to the world. A small but growing cadre of educators are eager to join the movement to participate in sharing educational resources. Some see this as an opportunity to reach out to prospective students and alumni, others believe that we have a moral requirement to participate in spreading learning as widely as possible. All of us closely follow and admire the success of institutions like M.I.T with their OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, as well as other schools programs such Open Yale Courses and Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative.

    I'd like to argue that the models provided by M.I.T., Yale and Carnegie Mellon are only one sort of example that could be followed, and that increasingly all institutions of higher learning will have the opportunity and choice to support individual instructors in their desire to make their learning open. The big change is the introduction of coming ubiquity of lecture capture systems. Platforms such at Techsmith Relay, Echo 360, and Tegrity currently allow (or will soon allow) recorded lectures to be published directly to iTunesU or YouTube.edu. We are very close to a point where individual instructors will be able to make the choice for themselves if they want to share their lectures and learning material with the world.

    This will be a big change, because learning content that originates in our institutions will now begin to be widely and freely shared to the world without the institution providing the primary sponsorship for this activity. The M.I.T., Yale and Carnegie Mellon open learning initiatives are all examples of top-down organization and strategic positioning. By pairing lecture capture systems and free public media platforms such as iTunesU and YouTube.edu faculty will be making their own decisions about what, when and how to share their materials. Lecture capture systems that were originally purchased to meet a pressing a institutional need to provide enrolled students with recorded lectures (as a large body of evidence supports this as a learning tool and students are increasingly demanding this service) will begin to be turned tools for open learning.

    I don't think we have quite recognized how quickly the quantity of open learning content will begin to grow as lecture capture systems are adopted, nor have we fully thought through the policy implications and communication opportunities tied to this trend. But I do hope that those of us who work in academic technology do whatever we can do to allow our instructors to have the choice and the option to share their classes with the world.

    What do you think? Do you see the spread of lecture capture systems as an important component in the open learning story? Do you have any examples where this is occurring on your campus? Do you think the lecture capture companies will start positioning their products as a part of the open learning revolution?

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Comments on Support Faculty Choice for Open Learning

  • Open lecture capture systems
  • Posted by Parag on November 19, 2009 at 5:45am EST

  • I agree that the use of lecture capture systems will facilitate the creation of an enormous amount of content. I think it will also lower the cost of creating open content which will make it easier for many institutions to provide their content online for free.

    All this will bring about a very fundamental change in the way people teach and learn. I am not sure exactly what will happen, but I think universities will play a different role than they do now, and many people will also choose to be self educated.

  • Please don't call these "courses"
  • Posted by Susan on November 19, 2009 at 9:30am EST

  • I find it very puzzling that putting content online somehow turns it into a course. If content (lectures, papers, videos) are courses, what are we paying teachers for? Heck, let's just save a lot of money and get rid of them! This goes beyond mere semantics...

  • Capturing An Outdated Method of Teaching
  • Posted by Steve Taffee , Director of Technology at Castilleja School on November 19, 2009 at 2:00pm EST

  • I am all for capturing teacher's lectures and making them part of the open content movement, but let's not forget that lecturing is a relatively poor method of teaching for student retention. Granted, there are great lecturers who combine knowledge, storytelling, and perceptive questioning techniques to provide engaging, provocative classes. But the majority of lecturers are, let's face it, boring. This is why some colleges are so worried about the use of social media in classrooms as a "distraction" for students, who mentally bail on teachers who don't command their attention.

  • Who certifies learning?
  • Posted by MIS Prof , College of Business at small public teaching school on November 19, 2009 at 3:30pm EST

  • Sure, people can watch videos or read content on their own and learn a lot. I certainly still do that. Frequently.

    But lecturing is only part of what faculty do. Faculty also filter material for accuracy, quality, and currency. They fine tune that material to assist students in learning, based on exactly where the student is stumped or confused. (I've long since figured out and squirreled away a lot of different ways to explain most concepts or problem-solving techniques I cover in my courses).

    Faculty then certify that the student has actually mastered the material ... that's where the quiz, exam, project, and presentation grades come in. This is why some faculty are not comfortable with online courses; they don't know for sure who took an exam or how much that student actually knows (whether the student used unauthorized materials while taking the exam, for example).

    This certification is usually what students are aiming for when they matriculate. Just watching videos or reading material doesn't provide an independent confirmation that you really learned something.

    But I would never stand in the way of learning ... in any form. Just make sure the source material is good stuff produced by people who really know the subject.

  • Old idea
  • Posted by Nick , Assistant prof/chemistry at Hamline University on November 19, 2009 at 3:45pm EST

  • Used to be a textbook was "open" learning. Read it, do the problems, and you know something new. Are canned lectures really better? The meat of learning is in doing the problems and writing the papers. Lectures are window dressing for the main events. What you are buying into is distance learning - which is a big money maker for universities. (So they say - mostly because they haven't figured out the costs that are really involved. As an instructor, I suspect you will end up spending as much or more time responding to emails, chat rooms, etc than spent in giving a traditional course.)

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