The first activity on Block 2 of H817 asks us to write a blog post that describes our experience with open education.

My experiences of open education are fairly limited and so really I only have two complete experiences to mention:

Completing a MOOC:

1. Course on gamification at Coursera designed and delivered by Kevin Werbach. Overall my experience of the course was positive. At the time, a few years back, I had not really explored much about the topic. The content was well developed in terms of videos, slides and handouts by the author. The structure of the course was logical (see link above for the flow). I did engage slightly with my fellow learners but there was a great deal of volume of forum messages that were just impossible to keep on tabs of. The second issue was the evaluation process. This was done in the form of simple multiple “guess” questions and peer assessment. both processes were very clunky and ineffective.

One of the challenges with MOOCs is people not finishing the courses. This one on gamification, is the only one I have completed. I have signed up to study a raft of other courses, but never finished them. To be honest, for some I never even started them. This is hardly new and several studies have been done on the numbers and the causes.

2 – Search for OER resources

I have tried to search and resource materials on subjects for courses using OER materials. I have never had much success doing this. OER resources seem to be very spread out, in the sense that there are many, many repositories. Overall the website navigation of most of the sites is not very intuitive, which makes it difficult to find appropriate resources. Built in search functions are also generally poor. I have yet to find a good OER hub with a solid search capability. OER resource use has not been a great experience so far.

In general I would say my experience with “Open” has been incredibly average. I sense a great deal more has to be done to ensure a quality experience, both from a learning perspective and as that of an educational practitioner.

[ Image Credit: Freeimages.com Joanie Cahill ]