“KWARC was!”

Presentation by Ulf-Daniel Ehlers (University of Düsburg-Essen, EFQUEL, Germany; science-without-borders.org) at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Workshop Open Educational Resources.

Introduction:

1. Not all lecturer are willing to publish their learning materials as the quality of learning materials and the knowledge of the lecturer are his advantage when having to competing with others.
2. Many materials are not used, although publicly available: They do not fit to the lecturers way and practice (not-invented-here syndrome).

We need a new view on quality of learning materials. So is the fact that educational resources are open adding more complexity to assuring high-quality material? The quality challenge is to foster open educational practice of teaching and learning with OER is the educational practice.

So far we have used LMS as island, but we should understand LMS as gates to OER: connected learner, workflow learning, informal/ mobile learning, adaptive and flexible learning, individualization/ personalization, accessibility – then quality is about innovating educational process (to individualize education, not bringing all students to one level and to encourage students to ask questions/ to engage depending on their abilities). And supporting this new process is what should make us good lecturers.

But what is quality for a lecturer? What is it for a student? Who defines/ assess quality? Should quality be pre-defined by institutions and testing against students? Or should teachers and learners rather collaboratively negotiate a notion of quality?

Moving from E-Learning 1.0 to E-Learning 2.0:

• E-Learning 1.0: quality assessment through experts, learning platform, content, curricula, course structure, tutor availability, multimedia (interactivity), acquisition process
• E-Learning 2.0: social networks, communities of practice, interaction, participation process, communication, learning diaries, e-portfolios, personal learning environment, quality assessment through learners and peers (requires also changes to the institutions and workflows)

This entry was posted by Christine on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 9:17 am and is filed under cmueller, Conferences, WSKS 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.