OU blog

Personal Blogs

John Taiwo Okewole

Visual Representation of Open Education (H817 Assignment)

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by John Taiwo Okewole, Saturday, 9 May 2020, 01:22

Open education has been depicted in many ways  and it will be defined going into the future. In my reading of Cormier (2013) and Bates (2015), I came across some fascinating notes and definition about Open Education worthy of pondering on. It has also set me into further thinking about the unbundling that openness has brought into education largely. So, presented below is the visual representation I developed.

Openness from OU to Cormier to Bates...

References

Bates, T. (2015) ‘What do we mean by “open” in education?’ Online Learning and Distance Education Resources [Online]. Available at http://www.tonybates.ca/ 2015/ 02/ 16/ what-do-we-mean-by-open-in-education/ (Accessed 21 April 2020).

Cormier, D. (2013) ‘What do you mean… open?’, Dave’s Educational Blog, 12 April [Blog]. Available at http://davecormier.com/ edblog/ 2013/ 04/ 12/ what-do-you-mean-open/ (Accessed 21 April 2020).


Permalink Add your comment
Share post
John Taiwo Okewole

H817 - Student co-creation

Visible to anyone in the world

I guess the practical background laid out by DeRosa (2016) here http://robinderosa.net/uncategorized/my-open-textbook-pedagogy-and-practice/ serves me well to discuss about student co-creation in the open and increasing active learning and participation for a course. Interestingly, I have come to understand that any course can bring together the student to team up and learn while they contribute and develop in a project-based format. The caveat like DeRosa said is it should be modeled and facilitated.

This should start from deep reflection from the course teacher, what is it that he/she wants to achieve in the process. For instance, immersion of the learners in the concept or reduction of inequality in terms of access to materials etc. Something must be the overarching goal from the outset and that helps to inspire the tutor through the arduous process. At this stage, we have to be frank with ourselves, it is not going to be smooth sailing for anyone at the start not of course the tutor. However, with the goal in place and mind preparation, student co-creation can be achieved.

For instance, the OU courses that I have experienced have inculcated some form of co-creation into it. Though I have not seen an ultimate aim to change the learning material based on the learners contribution. In fact, that decision to let learners into the end goal of the project can become a huge motivation for them to input their energies, time and focus into getting it done.

So, I believe any course can adopt student co-creation. While it varies at levels of implementation, it is also dependent on the readiness and how far the tutor is willing to go. Which invariably determines how much the learners will be willing to input.


Reference

DeRosa R. (2016) ‘My open textbook: pedagogy and practice’ [Online]. Available at: http://robinderosa.net/ uncategorized/ my-open-textbook-pedagogy-and-practice/ (Accessed 25 April 2020).

Permalink Add your comment
Share post
John Taiwo Okewole

Open Education technologies - Video (Streamed and OnDemand)

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by John Taiwo Okewole, Saturday, 25 Apr 2020, 06:02

Open education simply took a leap because of the opportunity that videos brought to us. Video can be streamed live or available on demand. and with several services like youtube, vimeo etc making it freely available, it is a function of adapting it appropriately for learning use. In fact, projects like Khan Academy has increased the prospects for open education and pushed opportunity for acceptance and accessibility of learning to wider community.  

Now, video has seen a lot of improvement across the aisle because of video conferencing tools and services which are used for classes, live discussions etc.

Video is a killer app for open education I guess.

Permalink Add your comment
Share post
John Taiwo Okewole

My Learning Journey with Open Education

Visible to anyone in the world

My first experience in open education was with MIT OpenCourseware around 2003. I had understood and was already tinkering with Open Source Software (OSS) so, OCW was an amazing find for me to get materials from MIT freely. Then Wikipedia replaced my normal Encyclopedia Britannica and Americana. I however became more active in the space as a stakeholder when I joined MERLOT.org 2011/2012 as a Peer Reviewer.

I got sandwiched in between the development of the MOOC and was part of one of the first MOOC done at MITx 6.002x Circuits and Electronics. I was also part of University of Central Florida's Blendkit MOOC in 2012. I was fortunate to complete a Certificate program at Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (OPNZ) in 2017 and then OU.

In 2013, I had my conference papers published on COL's OAsis and open access repository of OERs. I have also published a book using the Creative Commons license.

I can confidently say, I have learned so much in a lifetime that I may not have had without Open Education. The different forms and opportunities it has afforded has changed education forever and I believe it will only get better.

Permalink 1 comment (latest comment by Alan Clarke, Friday, 3 Apr 2020, 11:31)
Share post
John Taiwo Okewole

Blogging about blogging

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by John Taiwo Okewole, Monday, 3 Feb 2020, 06:29

CAUTION: This particular post will continually be updated as new information shows up.

From the days of Google's blogspot, I have blogged. So, why do I blog? I blogged as a tech responsibility in order to understand every aspect of blog development and be in a position to set it up for clients. I also blogged to have a webpage to share content with various stakeholders on my journey (an easy and cheap way to have a free website). I am not a persistent blogger because of another feature called Micro-blogging read a smaller blog. Twitter is an example and I relatively tweet things more than I blog. Howbeit, I have an idea. For the purpose of this course, I will partly develop tweets about an activity for instance, post it and then aggregate on the blog. That seems to be a cool idea, right?

The fact that blogging helps to push ideas in a condensed manner is a great way to use blogs. I am using the blogging platform provided by Open University (OU) where I am presently studying for a Masters in Online and Distance Education. Of course there is a lot of blogging platforms available on the Internet including blogspot, wordpress etc which can be graduated to a full website compartment. Additionally, web developers often design a blog page on a website such that blogs can be written for whoever manages the site.

Blogging is good, tasking but fun too. Oh, the interactivity of blogs is one of the key things that differentiates it from a normal webpage. On a blog, people can be allowed to comment. Interestingly, I just realized that it is the same model that most online news outlets use to post their news (fig 1). Relatively, you will find a comment section below a news page - that is a refined blog.

blog news

Fig. 1 - the comment section of an online news page

Okay so, let me learn from your experience about blogging. Do you have one and is it straightforward for you? Your various opinions are worth a huge measure of learning for me.

With gratitude
JT


Permalink 7 comments (latest comment by Stephanie Nwaoroni Akinwoya, Thursday, 6 Feb 2020, 13:37)
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 10163