This week, the online global education community is kicking off the first ever Open Education Week, an event initiated by the OpenCourseWare Consortium to raise awareness to the increasing number of possibilities within this field.  This growing movement is poised to change the way that education is viewed, both in the developed and developing world.  It has the potential to revolutionize the field of international education development with the increase of connectivity in regions that, until only recently, were limited to outdated and ineffective learning resources and teaching methods.

However, some of these new exciting opportunities and tools that are being developed are set amidst unfamiliar computer programming lingo, an increasing number of acronyms, and a community of open education advocates with various ideologies.  So to demystify some of these, let’s imagine for a moment that we want to create a digital classroom for distance learning, targeted to students in a remote area of a developing country.  First, we’ll need to develop our course materials and the body of information that we plan to teach:

• OER: Open Educational Resources

 

OERs are the various course and learning materials that are being made available in the digital classroom which can easily be accessed for learning, teaching and research purposes.  Covered under open licenses, these resources can be modified and updated by multiple users creating “living” resources — those that have the ability to grow and adapt with new innovations, historical events, new perspectives, etc.

OERs make up what some have termed a “universal virtual library”, and where best to start developing the resources for our digital classroom than there.  A great example of this is Wikieducator, an international online community project that facilitates collaboration between educators.

So once we’ve chosen and developed what we’ll teach, how will that content be represented and organized as a course or curriculum?  That’s where OCWs come in.

• OCW: Open CourseWare

OCWs are a type of OER.  Simply put, they are the learning materials or collection of OERs organized to serve as course content.  These, like OERs, are openly licensed and can be reused and reshaped so that they can be introduced in various educational settings.

And that’s great for us since we want input from other teachers, education professionals, and the students themselves so that, ideally, they will have the most current information taught through the most effective teaching methods.  Some OCW programs such as MIT OpenCourseWare and the Khan Academy have already taken great strides in perfecting this model.  However, OERs by themselves cannot monitor the learning process or offer accreditation to students.  We need to develop something that shows that our students have fulfilled the learning requirements and have acquired new skills.

• Badges:

Badges are the big new thing in Open Education and are still in the early stages of development.  An idea that was explored during the 2010 Mozilla Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival, the badges would certify the specific skills a student had attained and the quality of the instruction that they received.  According to a recent New York Times article, a few major companies like Microsoft are already using a badge system to certify that their employees have received technical training.

Once we’ve developed our own badge system, perfected our curriculum, and established ourselves as a credible source for quality education, it’s time to think bigger.

• MOOC: Massive Open Online Course

MOOCs are similiar to OCWs except that their pedagogical theories and student base differ.  A relatively recent innovation in online course development, MOOCs are founded on the theory of connectivism and facilitate learning through teacher led discussions and presentations and developing peer-to-peer networks between students.  The potential class size for these courses can be staggering.  Several well-known examples at Stanford have exceeded 100,000 registered students, though only a fraction of them actually completed the courses.

Even though some MOOCs and badges are being monetized, we will of course try to keep our lessons free, though there is some argument for charging small fees to motivate students to complete the course.  But many questions remain: How will these new materials with the outsourcing — or crowdsourcing — of teachers affect the local education system?  Are the skills and information being taught that of which this particular population actually need and culturally relevant?  How will it prepare students for jobs already available in this cultural context?  A lot of these new innovations still have yet to be developed to suit the needs of the developing world but, with the right amount of cultural sensitivity, research and collaboration, there are many exciting potential advantages to come.