Dear Innovators,
There has been a lot of talk about higher education the past 18 months. The culprit driving the conversation is the rise of online teaching and learning, in particular, the Massive, Open, Online Course, the MOOC. Many of you will have heard this term, and heard a mix of praise and vilification, “MOOCs will save us!” or “MOOCs will destroy us!”
It’s possible you have formed an opinion about online teaching and learning. Either a positive or negative opinion, based on your colleagues’ impressions, your discipline, your institution’s stance, or your own personal feelings about your well-established, and proven teaching practices. Wouldn’t it be much, much better if your opinion were based on your experience?
I entice you to explore your feelings about online teaching and course development in the context of a field of study you love. Unless you were raised by academics (and that happens from time to time), you likely did not form an opinion as a child that you would like to study one discipline, passionately, amazingly, all your life.
As a teen it’s possible you didn’t know that you would love learning and focusing on one subject so much. Maybe you did. As a young adult, as an older adult, something likely clicked for you and drove you to push through every level of learning available, tackle tremendous financial and family life hurdles to focus, research and write, and experience all that you needed to achieve your academic goals.
Likely you became driven because you love learning, and you love talking with others about your subject. It’s possible, in the constraints and everyday grind of working in higher education, with its budget, infrastructure, administration, meetings, and student numbers challenges, that you have lost a little bit of the love you felt about your area of expertise, your discipline of choice.
Here’s how online learning, particularly open, online learning,might help you find that love again. I’m talking about open learning that exists with no concern for budget lines, no concern for intellectual property rights, and no concern for graded assessments, Explore it, try it, learn the ways that you can think far, far outside the expected boxes of your institution, peer-reviewed journals, correctly formatted course outlines, and formal assessment methods.
Partner up with someone who can help you put all that you love about your work into an online course shell, show you key features about the technology to improve your significant teaching savvy, then invite interested, engaged, and motivated learners from every walk of life, and every corner of the globe, to your course shell, ready to hear what you have to say. Ready to contribute to what you know. See what you can help build, as a co-learner with learners you’ve never met.
Open, online courses are the new publishing, the new research and a new way to expand and evolve your personal boundaries. It wasn’t possible five years ago, for most academics to try this. Those who’ve been building open, online courses in their discipline from day one, mostly distance educators and early adopters in the STEM spectrum, love what they are doing in these spheres. Many do it with little extra remuneration, and little support from their home institutions. Why? Why would they do this with little care for the financial reward or the retention of their intellectual property?
Because they love their area of expertise and they want others to love it, and they want others to help promote and expand the possibilities within it and outside of it.
Warning!! Not everyone will get online teaching and learning right. Who defines right? You will make mistakes, your course may crash and burn, you may look like a total idiot, you may be criticized by your colleagues, your institution, people you’ve never met, your life partner, your tech-savvy children. So what?
You are a top scholar in your field. You have explored the thing that you love, inside, outside, from every angle. But there’s unexplored territory in your subject, doesn’t that intrigue you?
Get in there, get messy, make mistakes, and see what it’s all about. Write your next grant proposal for open, online education, find the open, online education platform in your neighbourhood and get to it.
There won’t be much money in it (unless you’re really good at writing grant proposals), there likely won’t be a lot of fame, but there could be. You probably won’t like the learning curve (there are things to learn about barely managed chaos, working with learners online, particularly how to manage the massive expressions of opinion that may arise). Online teaching is time consuming, it’s frustrating, it’s unreliable, it’s new, it’s an adventure, like anything worth doing, you cannot predict how it will turn out.
I urge you not to fear or judge the MOOC, but rather embrace it, take risks, kick the MOOCs ass with your extraordinary capabilities. Be a transformative leader, as you have always been.
Above all, consider how much fun the type of learning and teaching I’m talking about could be. I know that fun doesn’t always enter into higher education conversations, but there’s a new opportunity for it. Ask people like George Siemens and Stephen Downes, or any other Canadian academic teaching in open spaces if they’re having fun doing what they do. Can open, online education help you rediscover your deep passion for what you know and love? Can it be fun? There’s only one way to find out.
Yours most sincerely,
Jenni Hayman, Executive Director & Collaborative Instigator, WideWorldEd
