“Before we examine MOOCs in more detail, briefly consider if the MOOC approach could be adopted in your own area of education or training.” Having reviewed the referenced material this week, I am sure that MOOCs could be adopted in my context of a Further Education College. Indeed, we have hosted open, online courses before. They were small taster courses so therefore could not be described as massive! The common issues surrounding MOOCs will need to be addressed. These include…

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In activity 11 we are asked to compare the advantages and disadvantages of ‘big OER’ and ‘little OER’ approaches. Weller (2010) describes traditional (big) OER as education providers producing high quality outputs tied to budgets, timescales and project constraints. Weller (2012) goes on to describe ‘Frictionless’ sharing. This approach refers to the low barrier of entry for scholars to create educational content then distribute at will through, for example, social networking. Big OER producers include: • Universities such as Open…

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In activity 10 we are asked to consider four providers of OERs to determine which of Wiley’s models apply to them: Coursera BCcampus FutureLearn OpenLearn Coursera I think Coursera is using the MIT model with elements of the Rice Model.  Course material is presented from a number of collaborating companies and institutions (190+ according to the website (Coursera, 2020)). Coursera employ a large staff including engineers, marketing and content strategists. This reinforces the idea that Coursera collate and distribute course…

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I have used Creative Commons licenses in the past. As a musician I tend to release material under the CC-BY-NC license. If anyone happens to want to use my music in a commercial setting (and they do) there is a means for them to pay for that. Everyone else is free to download the music for free, adapt it and even give it away to friends for no cost beyond the bandwidth to download. For any education materials I may…

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I have constructed an outline for a ‘digital skills’ course for new staff members in our organisation.  This five week course should ensure that new staff members understand the basics of using computers in our environment including productivity applications, security and how the web can be used to enhance their work. My delivery schedule for the 5 weeks is: Week 1 – Introduction to the basics of computing As this is for new staff, I wanted to include a basic…

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My own view on the three key issues in OERs are openness (sharing of knowledge and resources), access (the ability of individuals to access education) and transition (from informal to formal learning). Openness The ability to discover, use, reuse and redistribute resources is an important one for our Further Education context.  Wiley (2010) suggests that sharing and openness are the basis of education itself.   One of the challenges appears to be sharing of resources once they have been acquired…

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Here is my response to Activity 3: Representing open education. I wanted to create some sort of interactive content but I wasn’t sure what. I thought some sort of decision tree would be good so I sketched out quite a few options on paper but I kept finding it didn’t make sense. In the end I compared 5 areas of open vs. closed material and used the Juxtaposition tool in h5p to present this. Drag the slider from right to…

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“Publish a blog post that describes your experience with open education. Is it just with the OU, or have you studied a MOOC” I have both used and created open educational resources. I created a short guide to the program eXeLearning (an eLearning designer based on Mozilla Firefox). This was in the form of a course created in eXeLearning and distributed as a SCORM and .elp which is the file format of eXe. This is hosted on the wiki educator…

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Think back to the learning theories you investigated in Week 3. To what extent are those theories relevant to the predictions made by Sharples et al.? Playful learning This goes beyond the nursery level ideas of play such as Circle Time, Free Play which are recognised guided learning activities for children. This section talks about play for adults, gamification, stating that play has no age limit. This seems to be compatible with behaviourism where actions lead to rewards and also…

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1)    Mixed / Augmented Reality   I feel Mixed/Augmented reality could be very useful for new students in our college. I am currently doing a lot of work in relation to the induction period (between enrolment and first ‘proper’ classes). There are many opportunities to make this time more informative and fulfilling. Although we do our best to cut down on jargon there are some difficulties. For example Student’s Association, Student Support and Admissions services mean something to us but…

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