open models
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Online pivot – the present
via GIPHY Following on from the look at how the past is important in understanding the online pivot, I’ll now shift to the present. HEIs now have to plan for multiple scenarios in September which include options around fully online, rolling half populations on campus and half online, fully on campus for some, fully offline for others, and all variations in between. They are also having to do this while imagining severe economic impacts arising from loss of international students, research funding and secondary income such as food, accommodation, bar expenditure from students. Oh, and then there’s the physical health of students and staff which is at risk if you…
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Connectivism and scale
via GIPHY In his recent post criticising the Creative Commons Certificate, which I won’t comment on, Stephen Downes repeats a claim he has made before about the scalability of the connectivist approach, stating: One of the major objectives of our original MOOCs was to enable MOOC participants to create interaction and facilitation for each other. This is because there is no system in the world where a 1:30 instructor:student ratio will scale to provide open and equitable access. In my view, this model worked very well. I’ll preface what I’m going to say with stating that I’m a big fan of connectivism for two reasons: it is an example of…
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A USB port for informal learning
I’ve been part of a team working on an unusual (and dare I use the word, innovative) course at the OU. It’s called ‘Making your learning count‘, and the unusual thing about it is that it doesn’t really set out to teach a particular topic. Rather it seeks to recognise the learning that people bring with them from informal means, such as OER and MOOCs. There are several challenges in this. Firstly, we can’t just formally recognise all possible OER, so we have to get students to do something to demonstrate their learning. But then secondly, having gone for this broad approach, as opposed to just accrediting a specific MOOC…
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Open business models
(Image Clarisse Meyer CC0 from Unsplash) At the Creative Commons summit I was lucky to get a copy of Paul Stacey and Sarah Hinchliff’s Made with Creative Commons. It explores businesses that have based a model through licensing some aspect of their product via a CC license. They set out a number of case studies such as Cards Against Humanity, Noun Project, OpenDesk, etc. It’s freely available (of course), and definitely worth a read. In the first part Paul and Sarah set out some key principles underlying the case studies. The authors are quite honest in stating that their approach to the book changed as they worked with the case…
