Towards openness and sharing when learning.

Prior to the ONL Course, I have also participated in another reading course entitled “Networked Learning and Competence Development”. Both these courses opened my mind for reflecting about the current online learning environments when it comes to openness and sharing learning resources. Openness plays an important role for educators to improve quality in course delivery and students learning experiences. This is true as the student-centered learning (SCL) is improved by sharing resources and give the opportunity for leaners to engage in the course learning activities. Not only learners, but also universities and teachers can benefit a lot when openness and sharing of resources are promoted across campuses.

However, in some education contexts, with the advance in information and communication technologies (ICTs), openness continues to be a challenge from the teachers’ side where the later are not willing to enable access to course materials. At university level, some issues related to policies can also hinder the openness process for improving learning.

In this topic, I was happy to get more reflections from peers in my PBL Group about ways, strategies and concerns related to the creation of an open learning environment. As per the discussion we had in our group 5, open education is one of the recommendations from international organisations such as EU and UNESCO for enabling education for all. But when you look at the implementation of this strategy, very few universities, around the world have adapted this recommendation of going open.

To sum up on this topic, being open to the learning community has to be cultivated in our culture (individual preferences) as it is from that mindset that teachers of today will be able to easily share the resources for supporting student-centered learning processes in the current digital learning environment. Universities around the world should encourage openness and sharing of learning resources by creating a related conducive environment.

For example, more specifically regarding this ONL course, the way webinars are recorded and uploaded on YOUTUBE is really a good strategy for openness and sharing resources as it helps a lot for those who may have missed the live sessions to recap.