29.1 Systems for supportive open teaching  (Page 3/6)

Such recognition and reward for teaching is practiced in the Open University for the same reasons that teaching success can be measured by peer review of the scholarship in authored materials and user reviews of its effectiveness and impact with learners and others. I have argued in Opening Up Education that successful supported open learning depend on the four Ps of support: pedagogic support as built into materials, personal support of the learner, peer support from fellow learners and the professional support provided by ‘teachers’ and that the latter is most important most of the time. But those professional teachers also need to feel, and actually be, supported if they are to make open education a mass rather than a niche phenomenon. The culture change that is needed lies mostly with institutional policies and practices, not teachers or learners. Perhaps, as with OERs, this needs to happen first in the most prestigious institutions or be recognised by the most prestigious learned societies to demonstrate to everyone else that teaching matters as much as research.

References

Lane, A.B. (2008a) Who puts the Education into Open Educational Content? In Richard N. Katz, ed., The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education and Information Technology Revisited, Boulder: EDUCAUSE, 2008.

Lane A.B. (2008b) Chapter 10 Widening Participation in Education through Open Educational Resources. pp 149-163. In Eds Ilyoshi, T. and Vijay Kumar, M.S., Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. MIT Press. 2008. ISBN 0-262-03371-2. Available at (External Link) .

Lane, A.B. (2008c) Am I good enough? The mediated use of open educational resources to empower learners in excluded communities. 5 pp, In Proceedings of 5th Pan Common Wealth Forum on Open and Distance Learning, London, 13-17 July 2008. Available at (External Link) .

UNESCO (2002) Forum on the Impact of Open CourseWare for Higher Education in Developing Countries, UNESCO, Paris, 1-3 July 2002: final report. Avaliable from (External Link) . Accessed 23 April 2007

Comments

1. systems for supportive open teaching - elearnspace - november 26th, 2008 at 3:08 pm

[...] experienced this in CCK08: Systems for Supportive Open TeachingJ: “I think it more valuable to think about how openness changes the basic praxis of teaching [...]

2. beth.harris - November 28th, 2008 at 10:20 pm

Interesting post! There is clearly incredible value to be found in co-creating educational resources — and moving away from the lone teacher developing their course. At Smarthistory.org — an art history resource I am developing with Dr. Steven Zucker (we recently won an award from Avicom — the multimedia wing of the International Council of Museums — the “gold award” in the web category), we believe that audio and video conversations can be a powerful teaching tool — and the feedback from our students supports this. Students listen to learning taking place — through social interaction — and by opening up our classrooms, we can only become better teachers. And the question is — as Andy points out — how can we best expand this across institutional and international boundaries.