Chris Lott

I’ve seen activities from his open class activities in the past, but meeting Alec Couros in person at Open Ed strengthened my resolve and I’ve signed up to participate as a (non-credit earning) learner in his Open Access Course EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education. The amount of time I’ll have to participate is unclear—and subject to forces outside my control—but enjoying the freedom of participating at my own pace and in the way(s) that work best for me is one of the great things about Alec sharing this experience with the world.

Check out the EC&I 831 course wiki for more information and, if interested, to sign up.

I like the term open teaching (OpenTeach?) because it helps distinguish one kind of open education goal– provision of open materials (though, as I discussed earlier, that goal can and does stem from widely divergent motivations)– from the necessarily (?) related objective of teaching an open class. Of course an open learner might be taking part in or making use of open materials in any of the three major ways: as a guided learner whose guide is using open materials in a closed course, as a student in an open course, or as an independent learner.

"Open Education" is a vast area with many different territories. "Open Learning" encompasses a diverse group with some strikingly dissimilar needs. An "Open Course" might refer to a list of readings, a "complete" course without instructor, or a guided course. And then at some point a course becomes large enough or guided enough or at least some kind of schedule is suggested and it becomes a "Massively Online Open Course".

Then there are those labels and titles of initiatives that seem to cut various slices of the open education pie: OCW, OER, OpenEd…

It’s a bewildering array of options that makes discussion about accreditation (amongst other topics) difficult because I, at least, am unsure what kind of open education is being discussed at any given time. If "Open Accreditation" is referring to ways in which to confer some kind of material value to the learner who has succeeded in an "Open Teaching" environment, the road to accreditation hacking Shangri-La is a bit less hazy– a slightly smaller step– than providing the same service to the independent learner. The biggest problem is that of assessment. In an open teaching class, there is at least someone who could conceivably perform, facilitate, or coordinate assessment activities… in the independent learning scenario there is no one in that role.