The Benefits of Open Learning

This past week, MIT Media Lab's course in Learning Creative Learning focused on "Open Learning," a term that means different things to different people. Webopedia defines open learning as "an approach to learning that gives students flexibility and choice over what, when, at what pace, where, and how they learn." Described in this way, open learning sounds like it could be another name for interest-based learning. 

However, "Open Learning" refers to more than an educational paradigm; the concept extends to all the freely available materials and resources that support an interest-based (or open) approach to learning. You probably use some of these resources already—Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Earth, Khan Academy—but there are more being added every day. 

As John Seely Brown and Richard Adler state in their article Minds on Fire (Educause Review, 2008), "vast [Internet] resources include the rapidly growing amount of open courseware, access to powerful instruments and simulation models, and scholarly websites, which already number in the hundreds, as well as thousands of niche communities based around specific areas of interest in virtually every field of endeavor" (p. 32). These "open educational resources," or OERs, have expanded learning opportunities for anyone with an internet connection. People from all over the world—and that includes homeschoolers—can easily access, use, adapt, and share high-quality learning materials. 

There are so many resources now that keeping up with them can become a full-time job: entire blogs, such as Self Made Scholar and The Do It Yourself Scholar, are devoted to reviewing materials as they become available. 

As a home educator, I've been asking myself and others: how can we make the most of these online resources and, better yet, contribute to them ourselves? 

What I hadn't considered was the possibility of conventional public schools getting involved with the OER movement. I'm glad my eyes were opened by a recent article in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, "Opening a New Kind of High School: The Story of the Open High School of Utah" (Tonks et al, March 2013),  which describes how a public high school is using OERs. What can we learn from their experiences?

What I see as a key difference between the Open High School of Utah and a proprietary online high school curriculum (such as the Virtual Learning Academy Charter School) is the amount of control that teachers have over content. I was disappointed to learn that VLACS teachers cannot customize course content to suit their own needs (or the needs of their students); they aren't even able to fix broken hyperlinks within an existing course. Instead, they have to post corrections on the announcement page as a workaround. In comparison, OERs empower teachers, as the article about the Open High School of Utah explains: 

"When a school decides to adopt OER . . . this policy requires teachers to identify resources, judge their quality, align them to standards, aggregate them in meaningful collections, and choose or design accompanying activities and assessments. Teachers and staff also become involved in ongoing processes of evaluation and continuous quality improvement. Where “teacher-proof” curriculum assumes few or no skills on the part of the local teacher, adopting OER is the ultimate expression of confidence, empowering teachers to bring all their expertise to bear in the classroom."—Tonks et al, "Opening a New Kind of High School"

I believe home educators have an excellent opportunity to "bring all their expertise to bear" as open learners. We can access, remix, and share OERs with each other. One place to begin is with this list of Free Online Resources that I've assembled. Take a look at the list and then let me know—what works for you?