Open Strategies in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges

[Use the directions that follow to access a slideshare as well as the audio for the presentation.] “Last week (11-13 April), I attended the DEANZ 2012 (Distance Education Association New Zealand) conference  in Wellington, where I gave a presentation titled: “Open Strategies in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges”. I uploaded my slides to the DEANS conference presentation site, where the presentations are linked to the schedule. It is worth checking out the other presentations and papers. I’ll post more comments about this excellent conference and the sessions that I attended soon, but I thought I would upload my presentation here first. I decided to record my talk myself using an audio recorder app on my iPhone, which I simply held while I delivered my talk and advanced the slides. I then uploaded the audio file to Unitube (a digital repository at the University of Otago), and embedded it below (I can’t upload audio files directly to my free WordPress.com account). So, you can view (or download) the slides from this blog or the DEANZ conference site, and you can hear the audio here or on Unitube (where it can also be downloaded). By playing the audio file here, and advancing the embedded slides below on your own, you will have a pretty good seat without leaving this post.” [The abstract for the presentation reads as follows:] “In business, social media, and other aspects of contemporary society, we can trace the shift in models of production, delivery, and consumption from Push (broadcast) to Pull (download) to Share (co-create). Similarly, we are beginning to see new models of provision emerging in higher education. As Curtis Bonk points out in The World is Open: How Technology is Revolutionizing Education, in theory, ‘[a]nyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime’ (2009). Martin Wellers is one of an increasing numbers of academics that are promoting the benefits of open, digital scholarship (2011). However, rather than transforming how courses are designed and delivered, most institutions of higher learning are using information technology in a limited way, to enhance traditional classroom teaching (Bates, A. W. T., Sangra, A. 2011). Although institutional structures and practices may be resistant to change, innovative individuals and institutions have developed ‘open’ strategies that provide models for others to follow. For several years, coordinators of OOCs (Open Online Courses) and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have made use of network technologies to leverage the wisdom of the crowd and to amplify the reach of tertiary courses for both credit and non-credit students (de Waard et al., 2011; Kop, Fornier, & Sui Fai Mak, 2011). More recently, Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) and MIT’s MITx, have demonstrated how traditional, formal learning for a limited number of fee-paying students can support informal learning for a much larger number of off-campus participants for free. In this paper, I discuss recent research relating to open education and report on my experience as a non-credit participant in several open courses. I discuss recent initiatives by Stanford and MIT and reflect on the potential of Open strategies for traditional tertiary institutions.”