An open approach to learning
July 2007
Kim Thomas
A quiet revolution is taking place in the world of distance learning. It started five years ago when the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to make all its course materials freely available on the world wide web. Several other institutions followed suit. Now the Open University (OU) is taking the idea a stage further, by not only making course materials available, but offering collaborative learning technologies, such as instant messaging and webconferencing, on its OpenLearn website.
OpenLearn (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn) was launched in October 2006, and will run for two years. The aim is to put 5,400 hours’ worth of learning materials on the site by April 2008, about 5% of the OU’s entire course content. About 2,700 hours are already up, from subjects across the curriculum, including science, education, mathematics, technology and modern languages.
“The mission of the OU has always been about social justice and open access to education,” says Laura Dewis, OpenLearn’s Communications Manager, and the OpenLearn project is seen as a natural extension of this philosophy.
The project will cost £5.6m, most of which is being met through a grant from the Hewlett Foundation, an American philanthropic organisation that also helped to fund the MIT project. The Foundation recognised that the OU already had a huge number of distance learning materials that could be adapted for open courseware, says Laura.
The OpenLearn site, developed using the Moodle learning management system, has two main components: the LearningSpace area (openlearn.open.ac.uk) and the LabSpace area (labspace.open.ac.uk). The LearningSpace contains the course materials themselves, which anyone can read or print out. These materials are mostly in text form, and include sample assignments and sample feedback as well as course content.
The LabSpace, says Laura, marks the OU’s “commitment to innovation and change”, and is what makes OpenLearn different from other open courseware initiatives. Users need to register to use most LabSpace features, but once registered, they can work collaboratively by using e-learning tools such as discussion forums, instant messaging, FlashMeeting (the OU’s video-conferencing tool) and knowledge maps (a way of creating visual representations of ideas). In the autumn, RSS feeds and video blogs will be added.
Distance learning has traditionally been a fairly isolated activity, but the collaborative tools enable users to learn together, says Laura: “If you have a profile on the site, you can say what courses you’re currently learning, and other people can find you through the instant messaging facility, or you can book a Flash meeting to talk and share your thoughts on that. The idea is to help people build up the learning community.”
LabSpace is also the place where teachers and lecturers from outside the university can reuse the course content in all its forms: text, Flash animation, images and audio files. Content is issued under a creative commons licence, which means that anyone can reuse it for their own purpose as long as they acknowledge the OU’s authorship.
The aim is that the content will be used widely and imaginatively. “We hope that what we’ll start to see is a global community of educators collaborating with each other on developing courses,” says Laura. She would like to see the content becoming ‘viral’, with educators changing content, adding to it and passing it on to others.
To date, 560,000 people have visited the OpenLearn site and there are 19,000 registered users. Visitors come from 160 countries: in a typical week in June, the site had 8,000 visitors from the UK, 6,000 visitors from the US, and another 4,500 from elsewhere in the world. “It gives us international reach, which we [the OU] have never had before,” says Laura.
So, who is using OpenLearn – and why? The OU is carrying out research on a small sample of registered users, and has found a variety of answers. “Some people are using it to complement their existing studies,” says Laura. “There are others who are disabled or don’t have the money to access higher education, and because the content is in a digital form they can access it from home. We’ve also had feedback from people abroad in quite remote locations who have either come across the site because they found it through Google or they’ve had some sort of previous relationship with the OU and were looking for distance learning opportunities. And we’ve had some people who have used it to help their course progression choices.”
Other organisations such as the Workers Education Association (www.wea.org.uk) and the University of the Third Age (www.u3a-info.co.uk) are also reusing the materials with their students, while the Sussex Learning Network (www.sussexlearningnetwork.org.uk) is using OpenLearn as part of an e-learning project to help people with vocational skills. The OU has even heard from educators in Thailand, who are using the materials to educate people about the issue of child abuse.
The costs of setting up and running the site have been high, so what happens after the two years are up? The current materials will remain online, says Laura, but the aim is to make OpenLearn sustainable in the long term. There are three potential ways of doing this, she says.
The first is “enhancing people’s awareness of higher education, whether it’s with us or with another university.” The second is to widen participation: “The fact that there’s no accreditation, no stress or money, or set times that people have to study provides people from under-represented groups in higher education with more confidence in learning.” Third, she suggests, OpenLearn could “increase the number of students who are aware of the OU and decide to study with us.” So far, 1,600 of OpenLearn’s visitors have gone on to enrol in OU courses, but it is possible that these would have enrolled in the OU anyway.
Open courseware is not a substitute for formal learning: using OpenLearn will not lead to a qualification, and students do not have the opportunity to interact with tutors. But because it is freely available, anyone in the world, provided they have an internet connection, can have access to learning opportunities that might otherwise be denied them. As one commenter on the OpenLearn forum wrote: “Getting an OU degree is completely different from OpenLearn. Once you have got your degree, it’s yours for good. OpenLearn feeds the mind.”