Ken, thanks for the feedback. I do believe that a teacher's ability to create effective learning designs will be a critical differentiator in a future where Wayne Mackintosh and the other folks at WikiEducator and all those involved in Open Education Resource movements have succeeded in making high quality learning objects common and available to all. Here I am using learning design in the broad sense (as opposed to the narrow technical meaning that James Dalziel explained previously) “ simply put “ it is how you arrange learning objects and activities (which might include collaborative learning) to achieve specific learning goals, and although I have never thought about it as the “code” of teaching, I think the analogy works. In that analogy, teachers become the equivalent of software architects and engineers deciding the most effective and efficient ways to combine learning objects to meet the needs of their students. In the same way that software architecture positions are more resistant to outsourcing than programming jobs, I expect teachers who develop deep understanding of learning and teaching, and especially of how their students learn most effectively and efficiently, will continue to thrive. However this analogy should not be taken too far – learning design is not intimately bound up with computers and the internet. The lesson plans that our elementary to secondary school (or K-12 for the USA) teachers have created and documented for decades are learning designs, as are the sequences of learning objects and learning activities that our faculty members have created in OurVLE.
Since there are already electronic communities of practice where lesson plans are shared with open-source like licenses I suppose one could say that open source teaching has already begun. Here at the Mona campus, the Dean of our largest faculty agreed that all faculty members should have access to all the faculty's course websites on OurVLE, which in effect means that they would all be able to see all the learning designs, and importantly, how effective each was. This kind of openness is a good start, but I would be hesitant to say that we practice open-source teaching for two reasons. First, as others have pointed out, open-source is very much about issues of ownership and licensing, and while we have begun considering these issues I do not believe that the UWI's intellectual property policies as they relate to learning designs or learning objects meet the philosophical requirements of 'open source' (as defined by the Open Source Institute 1) or even 'free'. The second reason is that we do not practice, on a wide-scale, for learning design or learning object development the kinds of collaboration and innovation that characterize open-source software development, although this may simply be a question of the maturity of the practice and not of its existence. It may also be because we have not implemented the kinds of tools that enable these kinds of collaboration, and am eager to look at some of tools mentioned in previous posts that will help, especially since the issues of open-source teaching across the University's four campuses have been extensively discussed recently (though not under that name) as part of an executive review of our eLearning policies and practices. We have also recently established a relationship with MIT's OpenCourseWare project in which we mirror OCW, and I expect this to stimulate discussions within departments about use of and contribution to Open Educational Resources, but I think that these issues are only just beginning to rise to top priority for the majority of our faculty members. I think faculty interest and involvement with learning design as Dalziel defined it is even further down on the priority list. One of the reasons I think we needed to adopt FLOSS early was precisely because it takes a while for the organization to absorb new concepts such as FLOSS and OER and change the business model and organizational culture appropriately.
I would also love to hear suggestions about business models that will support Universities that participate in open source teaching.
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