Group items tagged

clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6

where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed "open content" license7

Such a model has limitations in how it can scale, given the need for physical buildings and direct contact.

core high-quality learning materials linked to cohorts of students working through those materials and receiving feedback from tutors.

The development of appropriate pedagogical models depends on understanding how people learn.

John Seely Brown

learning is less about transmission, or indeed less about knowledge, and rather about how to operate at personal and society levels has resonances in the current striking change in learning environments.

user gains the ability to personalize educational resources in the widest sense

customized learning agenda

a disaggregation of the content, support, assessment, and accreditation functions integrated into most education systems

As the technology emerges to support this form of learning, it is hard to know how to best apply it or combine it with existing methods and structures.

an imperative to experiment with the ways in which it might work.

content plays a direct teaching role, explaining tasks and incorporating ways to assess progress.18 This means that the value the OU has placed on its content differs from that of more conventional universities;

move toward open educational resources in its OpenLearn initiative risks its existing market while also offering a greater chance of reuse.

Enhancing the OU's reputation Extending the university's reach to new users and communities Recruitment of students from those who come to see OpenLearn Supporting widening participation

content-driven learners were more numerous in the survey data than social learners, it nevertheless seems that offering open content supports both models for learning, with users interpreting the site as designed to meet their needs.

Casual users may find their answers quickly rather than through engaging with the material in detail, though it is notable that around 10 percent choose to view the content in its complete "print version."

open approach allows universities to support learners at an additional marginal cost over providing access to students registered at each institution, although those costs are not insignificant. The total investment for initiating the OpenLearn service exceeded $11 million, of which nearly $9 million came from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which is clearly not repeatable across all institutions. Initiative-based funding completed in May 2008; since then the continuation of OpenLearn has depended on mainstreaming the approach22 so that production of open content happens alongside other production of content. Recent figures from MIT also reflect reduced reliance on outside funding as the institutional priority was recognized.23 On the other hand, it is worrying that Utah State University chose to cancel its open courseware program in reducing its costs to meet the financial downturn in 2009.24

The view of individuals learning in their own time and at their own pace continues to have a clear role and fits with other aspects of "learning to be," in which mastery of an area needs to combine access to individual knowledge sources with interaction and practice in the field.

parallel by empowering the learner to either engage quietly with content or to gather around the content as an attractor that brings together a sufficient mass of learners for social support and exchange to occur, related to but not dependent on the specific content.

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.

focus less on the age-related generational aspect while finding real evidence of "net behaviors" occurring in all student groups, changing the way some people relate to their educational experience

Our studies indicate that the merging of these two worlds can bring benefits in connectedness, willingness to learn, and engagement.

One difficulty has been the disjunction between the play experience and the need for demonstrable learning feedback.

European project called eXcellence in Decision-making through Enhanced Learning in Immersive Applications (xDelia) aims to use wearable sensors (see Figure 3) and serious games to identify and address the effects of emotional regulation in financial decision making in three fields: professional trading, private investment, and personal finance.

mixes games technology and feedback but also careful evaluation to address the learning concerns and fit the needs of industry. Again, this challenges conventional routes to education, as it is unclear that accreditation and assessment are the drivers; instead, motivation comes from more authentic experiences and links to others facing the same problems.

This approach is exemplified in citizen science, where members of the public contribute to scientific projects without needing significant specialist training or expertise

The iSpot Nature Observation Site

CMU found that adding metrics to the content itself increased its efficacy for learners by giving them feedback; it also enabled researchers to understand how the online content was being used.34 A mix of methods were applied in OpenLearn to build a picture of activity, combining conventional questionnaires and interviews with monitoring of blogs and analytics.

Results from research into the open world are of necessity often tentative and based on partial data, which conflicts with some of the norms of academic research — it seems that some Web2.0 principles allowing rapid software development also tolerate the idea of a "permanent beta."35 The slow rate of publication and the demands of review are at odds with busy practitioners' desire to contribute their observations and opinions for rapid reflection.

Open research also raises ethical and practical issues. One of OLnet's research subprojects investigates how participatory learning takes place across socially driven sites

. The ethical and pragmatic view is that such research activity is appropriate because no harm can be foreseen; realistically, it is not possible to obtain the informed consent we seek in other cases when we gather user data. The next stage in open research is to make the data as well as the conclusions public, and we are taking steps to build this practice into OLnet by providing less formal reports38 as we progress and organizing data in tools for others to access. These methods are still in development, but represent part of the movement toward a new understanding of the role of research and scholarship when information sharing and connections can be made very rapidly.

drawing attention to the power openness might have as an agent for change.

However, the move to being more open also raises challenges across each of the core functions of a university: business, teaching, and research.

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.

in producing educational material, it is important to look beyond the immediate audience to target a potentially wider group of learners.

; 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