Curt Bonk's View of Open Education

Curt Bonk continues to think about the important ways that education is opening up and how to participate in this work. Here is his keynote address at the University of Wisconsin that provides an overview of his forthcoming book, We All Learn. The talk is about 1 hour long. You can skip the Introduction by forwarding the slides to Slide #2.

What is the purpose of higher education?

What is the purpose of learning on the web? Is it a reference source or is it a "space for investigation, deliberation, and discussion where there are ongoing conversations about the value of different content being circulated." This is how Henry Jenkins frames the questions being asked about the whether or not university websites should be open platforms that allow students and the public to contribute or closed processes in which experts (university professors) provide credible information.

Jenkins notes that if we adopt the open model then

"Everyone in the university would need to have a stake in insuring the integrity of the process and that means being highly critical and skeptical of anything that gets submitted, whether by a student or a teacher."

This is a different model.

A central question in this model is what do you do when bad or wrong information is presented in a university-based website? Jenkins writes,

"It depends on what the university is trying to sanctify: is it seeking to guarantee the integrity of the product (in which case, every bit of content needs to be vetted) or the integrity of the process (in which case, the university is creating a space where people learn through vetting each other's content.) Is the reputation of a university based on the fact that they gather together lots of people who know things or is it based on the fact that they create a context where the ongoing questioning of information takes place?"

In short, are we teaching the content (only the facts) or are we teaching how to think critically about issues and ideas, how to make a persuasive argument and so forth? As teachers we often like to have the last word and to be the best source of information, but in quiet reflection we know that we have often been wrong and that the history of knowledge and science is always about the development of new ideas and throwing away earlier notions that don't hold up. Although we often do have good ideas that are worth consideration, there is still much room for improvement. Likewise, rather than teaching the basic facts wouldn't we be better off teaching people how to think more carefully about ideas in our fields of study?

Solo Professors as the Future of Higher Education?

In an article titled, "When Professors Print Their Own Diplomas, Who Needs Universities," Jeffrey Young at the Chronicle of Higher Education explores some interesting developments in open education.

He notes that there have been several recent examples of faculty opening courses to students beyond those who are enrolled in the university. The most radical example might by David Wiley's agreement to allow students to not only take his course without enrolling, but agreeing to provide feedback through grading to these individuals and then offering them a self-made "certificate of completion." In general, it seems unlikely that this scenario will be widely adopted as it too time consuming and too personally costly for faculty to give away their time in teaching large numbers of students (paying or not paying) to create sustainable models that merely open-up classrooms online. However, it is possible create learning communities that provide access to a wider group of participants at various levels of engagement. Creating learning communities requires us to shift on thinking from having only two types of roles (teacher or student) to a model in which everyone in the learning community has expectations for being both a teacher and a student. In this model it is assumed that a great deal of how I will learn will be dependent on my efforts to creating opportunities for others to learn-- in short, "teaching" will a platform for learning or for being a student. In other posts, I have described some general ideas for the possible roles in this type of learning environment.

Rather than assume that professors are individually going to offer courses to increasing numbers of people it seems more likely that they are going to manage complex learning communities with students at many different levels of participation and engagement. This can result in more "open education" for people interested in the topic who want to obtain some insights into the current thinking and development on a topic, but it would also create an environment in which more advanced learning can take place that is not completely dependent on "one" instructor doing all the teaching.

Open Classroom on YouTube

In various posts I have suggested that we experiment with open classrooms. Here is a discussion about an experience teaching in an open classroom.

Alexandra Juhasz, professor of media studies at Pitzer College, developed a course about YouTube using YouTube as the platform for conducting the course. She writes,

"I decided to teach a course about YouTube to better understand this recent and massive media/cultural phenomenon, given that I had been studiously ignoring it (even as I recognized its significance) because every time I went there, I was seriously underwhelmed by what I saw: interchangeable, bite-sized, formulaic videos referring either to popular culture or personal pain/pleasure."

There were really two experiments going on simultaneously in this course. First, the course itself was translated into the YouTube format. This required the course to be converted from an environment that relies a lot on text (readings, papers, even most slides in lectures have a lot of words) to video. Additionally, the classroom was open to the public and so the students and teacher could not only be observed in the classroom, but non-class members could comment about the material in the classroom. As she reflects on this experience, she comments on the impact of the open classroom, stating,

"The elite liberal arts classroom, usually (or at least ideally) depends upon an intimate and “safe” gathering of high-paying, and carefully selected students, to create a communal pedagogy. In my typical Pitzer College classroom, once doors are closed, students are asked to publicly contribute their interpretations, and sometimes personal experience or knowledge, always knowing that they are not experts, but are certainly experts-in-training. The steady construction of a confidence of voice, particularly in relaying a complex analysis, is one of the “services” we professors hope to provide. Students, often feeling vulnerable in the eyes of their classmates and their esteemed professor, are challenged to add their voices to the building dialogue, one in which they are an active, continuing member. Ever aware of the power dynamics that structure the classroom, allowing some to speak with comfort and others not, I engage in strategies to alter the “safety” of the space. Needless to say, these lofty dynamics begin to radically shift when anyone and everyone can see and also participate. During the class, students were routinely judged by critical YouTube viewers who we would never see or know, who may or may not be aware of the history of our conversations, or the subtle dynamics in the room. While access grew, the disciplining structures in place in a closed classroom (attendance, grading, community responsibility) could not insure that our outside viewers were as committed and attentive as were we. It was interesting to me to see the strength of the students’ desires to enforce the privacy of the classroom."

The comment by Juhasz correctly identifies one of the problems with creating open classrooms, but the lesson from this experiment is important. The lesson should not be that classrooms should not be open, but when and where they should be open and for what purpose. Opening classrooms beyond the immediate classroom participants needs to be done for specific purposes, not just open to the world for whatever happens. Here are some specific ways a teacher might open a classroom:

• Students are presenting projects and what feedback about their ideas from a broader audience. (Even this might be open only to people who have a specific expertise or set of interests.)
• the class is discussing a topic that is related to a current event and invites the public into this discussion.
• There is a community of interested people who work on a topic related to a classroom topic that would provide additional insight to the students in the classroom.
• The formal classroom experience is over, but students and former students are interested in continuing the course discussions informally by creating an extended learning community.
  

The point is that creating open classrooms is not an invitation to open everything up all the time. It is encouragement to think about the times and places in which both the learning in the classroom and the learning outside of the classroom would benefit from the openness.

Linking Laboratories, classrooms and the public

The web and all the various tools that are increasingly part of the web provide an opportunity for higher education to build seamless bridges from laboratories to classrooms to the public.

In the face-to-face world it is mostly impossible to effectively bridge all these domains of higher education, but the Web provides us with a means to knit these activities together. In earlier posts, I have talked about open science, open education and engaging the public, but no w I want to focus on building an infrastructure that puts these all together.

At the moment I can only illustrate what I have in mind by giving an example:

I. Public Level

The public seeking information about the effects of divorce on children and engaging in discussions, sharing examples, and exploring ideas about the topic.

II. Classroom Level

Teachers and students working with texts, discussions, analysis, activities, tests, etc. about the scientific knowledge about the effects of divorce on children.

III. Laboratory Level

Scientists working with advanced students to discover new information about the effects of divorce on children.

I have used the word level because my thinking about this is that knowledge would be organized from the most simple level to the most complex. I have illustrated this with three levels, but there would be many sub-levels within each of these major levels. For example, within the classroom level there would be introductory material, advanced material, and so forth. I have also illustrated this as one narrow topic when, in fact, there are many streams of knowledge that would get integrated together at each level. Even in this example, there would be knowledge about child development, parenting, marriage, divorce and then there would be scientific methods, critical thinking and other tools of synthesis.

So why does all this matter. I want to create intellectual communities that bridge people across all these levels. I want someone to be able to find the public level of information and be able to explore issues at more complex levels. I want scientists and teachers to create windows in their classrooms and laboratories so that others can observe their thinking and their creation of knowledge.

Is the Expert Making a Comeback?

A recent article in Newsweek suggests that the days of user-generated content are fading:

By any name, the current incarnation of the Internet is known for giving power to the people. Sites like YouTube and Wikipedia collect the creations of unpaid amateurs while kicking pros to the curb—or at least deflating their stature to that of the ordinary Netizen. But now some of the same entrepreneurs that funded the user-generated revolution are paying professionals to edit and produce online content.

In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. "People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information," says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a "perfect storm of demand for expert information."

Perhaps there is a growing awareness that there is some need to pay attention to the credibility of sources. There are new software tools that sort on credibility and other factors, but I am not sure that we want software deciding what is credible.

The article goes on to suggest that the credibility of user-generated content has increasingly been criticized:

"The timing could be right for a new era in Silicon Valley, a Web 3.0. It comes, after all, during dark days for the ideal of a democratic Web. User-generated sites like Wikipedia, for all the stuff they get right, still find themselves in frequent dust-ups over inaccuracies...."

This section set the blogging world buzzing because there are plenty of examples of bloggers who have exposed inaccuracies in mainstream media and in the government and business, so it is not completely clear whose work is better. Bloggers and user-generated content proponents suggest that their work is open to review and correction where other work is less open and often less easily correctable. The real debate may be more about the openness of the process.

George Siemens continues to expand his discussion of a "world without courses." His latest post expands his discussion of this idea.

He identifies for major problems in the creation of open learning enterprises:

1. Finding quality content
2. Creating pathways through content
3. Fostering connections between teachers and learners
4. Determining competence (accreditation of learning/teachers/schools)

I would add the following challenges to this list (some of these only apply to higher education and graduate education)

1. Creating quality content. We have models for textbooks, f2f lectures, etc and know somethings about effective teaching in traditional classrooms. We have not identified the effective models for open learning and we have barely begun to learn how to create effective multimedia instruction.

2. Creating learning communities. Perhaps this idea is encompassed in Siemen's "fostering connections," but there is a lot of work to be done regarding the creation of effective learning communities in regards to roles of instructors and roles of students. Here are some ideas I have been working on in regards to the roles of teachers and learners.

3. Developing collaborative relationships online. I think we have underestimated the amount of time, effort and skill that it takes to develop effective collaborative relationships from a distance. This is at the heart of advanced learning between teachers and graduate students. We have much to learn in this area.

4. Conducting research online. I am not sure if this is true, but I think that effective graduate training will require that we have our research tools online. In short, this means that we need to put our research labs online. The challenges of this task vary by field. Some fields already have much of their labs online (astronomy) and some fields would have significant difficulty moving all their work to an online space-- biology and chemistry for example. Some types of social science research can be moved online, but there are ethical and privacy issues that need careful attention.

Do we need "courses"?

George Siemens in a very interesting presentation asserts that we are beginning a process of unpacking our educational process into smaller and more distributed units and that we can begin to construct educational environments without courses.

Here is his general definition of a course:

Courses are structured, organized, bounded domains of information that are administered to students by educators who seeks to wrap some form of interaction or learning activities to that the experience will ultimately be able to achieve value primarily defined by academic standards through accreditation.

He unpacks courses into four parts: content/information, conversations (that is, instruction), connections (relationships between teacher and students, and among students) and recognition or accreditation.

We have been able take courses apart and distribute them, but how do we put them back together?

Here is how he frames this issue:

The key challenge that remains and it has not been addressed to date…is how do we pull these pieces (accreditation, content, conversations, and connections) together. How do we bring together the informal reputation points that we might derive through interactions with other or the referral process that may occur in our interactions with learning content and how then does that come together in an academic setting so that we have some degree of comfort when we dialogue with someone who stated they’ve received their degree from global online and distributed university as evidenced by these thousand learners who’ve assigned reputation points and as a result of having gone through x-number of sources of learning material, podcasts or whatever else. At this point this is a key missing piece. Pulling together the distributed conversations with the distributed content and finding a way to assign a degree of value is one of the biggest challenges of discussing an educational model that moves from the largely traditional hierarchical structure most of us recall.

This is a bigger problem than just "accreditation." The other aspect of courses is that there are sequences of learning various topics. It is generally important to learn to add and substract before learning to multiple and divide. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody has been exploring ways that organization is formed on the web, but there is still much that must be done to pull distributed learning back together. And we still need guides through this sequence. Most learners will not find their own paths through all the possible material.