I think the theoretical idea of open content for
education is great because there is a great need for teachers to have access to
materials for teaching. Students also need to be able to gain access to content
for projects, for developing skills, or simply for feeding their curiosity.
However, it’s too simplistic to just open up content to the world and expect
everyone to get smarter as a result.
There needs to be quality control through the use of
standards and user ratings. Standards can be established by educational
institutions or by communities of instructors. For user ratings to work well, users need to agree on the meaning of specific evaluation criteria, such as
presentation quality, accessibility, reusability (from one course to another),
ease of technological use, and instructional value.
Besides the issue of quality control, there appears to
be a misunderstanding that just anybody can teach. While people may have unique
knowledge to share and contribute to the overall knowledge of others, that is
not sufficient for being an effective instructor. Teaching requires the ability
to relate to your audience, to communicate with them in a language that they’ll
understand, to break down a concept into digestible parts, to explain or
demonstrate a concept or skill effectively, to enable effective and constructive
student collaboration as opposed to enabling random discussion among students,
to assess knowledge, to provide effective feedback without burning out by doing
too much marking…
Instructors need to know how to present specific types
of content in particular ways. You don’t teach about a definition or a concept
in the same way that you teach a procedure. Instructors also need to know how
to teach subject content using the terminology and methods relevant to that
subject. For example, teaching history requires an acceptance of multiple
perspectives that may be at odds with each other. In chemistry, students need
to understand how to apply theoretical knowledge to equations, and in turn, to
relate theory and equations to experiments.
Quality control and instructor skills are just two
aspects that must be considered in the delivery of open educational content.
There are a lot more aspects to consider and I hope to hear other people’s
perspectives on this topic.
