Activity 4

Activity 4: Identifying priorities for research

Timing: 3–4 hours

Imagine you are advising a funding organisation that wishes to promote activity and research in the area of open education.
Set out the three main priorities they should address, explaining each one and providing a justification for your list. 

I have been spending the last few days on surviving after a great, but physically hard, school trip to Sardegna. So I've been sleeping quite a lot. Now I better move on with the homework. Here it comes:

Having to choose three main priorities to promote activity and research in the area of open education, I will point at:

1. Barriers to uptake. They are plenty. A lot of them are about fear to loose power. They range from some teachers, professors and/ or entire institutions who fear to loose their authority in the field.
   
   Or it can be cultures where the tradition dictates some parts of the population don't have acces to knowledge. E.g. the Masai women as in this TED:

Other barriers could of course be the acces to the technology. Do you have the internet and do you have the devices to get acces to the material and the networks?
This is one of the problems Stephen Downes has tried to overcome when he talks about the re.mooc in this presentation
2013 03 11 moo cs in context from Stephen Downes

To get efficiency of the open education it is essentiel to identify these or other barriers, so you know how to get around them. 


2. Learning support. When people have the access to the material, they need the right support to understand how to work with the open materials.
   
   This help need to be offered in different areas. E.g help to understand the hardware, the different sort of software or the  course material itself. As Stephen Downes mentioned in the slides about re.mooc, there could be a local instructor.
   The pedagogy plays an important role as well. Daphne Koller talks about how the huge amount of students makes it easier to identify need for new pedagogical actions. It wouldn't surprise me, if course material meant for british university students had to be changed in some ways to work just as well for people from different social / culturel backgrounds.
3. Quality. How to assure the quality of the open education and how to get it recognized from others than the providers, are big questions right now. I hope to get the badges from #h817open just to find out, if they will be noticed anywhere. And now when California started to pay credit for online courses I guess the snow ball is on its way