Signed up for David Wiley’s course on open education. I was concerned that I might not have enough time to participate (and I am still concerned) but will see how it goes.
He gave two great presentations at the UNU/UNESCO meeting, and a lot of the points he raised made it into the suggestions that the “open education” breakaway session is reporting back now. We are also asking UNU and UNESCO (and the UN) to start adopting open content publishing policies … which would be quite an important move forward.
Other issues that were brought up (which provides more room for UNU to take them up in the future) included:
The UNU and UNESCO should think about strategies for assuring quality of education in the new decentralised education models that are emerging. I usually cringe when I hear the term “quality” in the context of OERs, but the group is not suggesting that content should be accredited by anyone – but that we need to think about quality in a broad way in the open education environment.
We need to look at more ways of bringing much needed bandwidth to those areas of the world that lack them.
An education-in-a-box toolkit that provides a very simple starting point for universities that want to start using e-learning. There are lots of resources in this field, but the idea was to include software and hardware recommendations and some ideas on policies (not prescribing anything, but sharing what others have done)
There were lots more, but I am trying to listen to the other groups who are reporting right now :-)
Posted on August 30, 2007