Based on some feedback from Peter and Charles I have been thinking about different ways to situate my paper. Today I went back to some readings we had at the beginning of class to focus on how these frameworks could relate to OCW.
In 1989 Moore described three important kinds of interactions that take place in education. These interactions are the following: teacher-student, student-student and student-content. Anderson (2004) elaborates on these interactions, explaining that even if teachers and students are separated by distance they can still have rich interactions. Anderson also notes that the interactions amongst students are important because “the communication of an idea to other students…raises the interest and motivation of the interactors” (134). In a traditional sense, student-content interactions would consist of a student reading a textbook and responding to questions from the text. Although the value added by technology to the student-content interaction has been debated (Anderson, 2004), there are clearly more content options available to the typical student today than there were thirty years ago.
Open course ware has the potential to greatly expand these three types of interactions. Most OCW resources focus on the “student-content” interaction. Students can read syllabi and course assignments, and in some cases take online mastery quizzes. In isolated cases OCW providers have made efforts to facilitate ways for students to learn with other students. For example, at one point MIT created a discussion board that allowed students taking an open course to interact with other students taking the same course. However this attempt was not successful. Wiley (xxxx) has argued that had more effort been put into encouraging student interaction that the student-student interaction would have become a more vibrant part of the MIT OCW program.
While MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon and others OCW providers all allow students to interact with content; they do not provide any sort of interaction between students and teachers. A logical reason for this is the difficulty in scale. Two thousand people can all access the same online reading assignment at the same time; however, for a teacher to interact with 2,000 students would be much more difficult. Perhaps for this reason little OCW focuses on teacher-learner interaction.
Although institutions do not typically provide teacher-learner interactions, a few teachers have been experimenting with this type of open teaching. This would be where I could bridge into the paper.
What follows is probably beyond the scope of the paper I am working on at the present, but I think has interesting implications for another article I'd like to think about in the future. Anderson also points out two additional types of interaction: teacher-content and teacher-teacher. Open educational resources can also help facilitate these kinds of interactions. When multiple teachers open their content, and take the time to look at content that is openly available it increases the exposure teachers have to different kinds of content. For example, reading ten syllabi written by one’s peers could potentially improve one’s own syllabus. Similarly, as teachers are more open with their content teachers may be more able to easily identify teachers with whom they would be interested in communicating.
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Typical courses involve much more than the learner-content interactions.
In fact, I would say in my experience much of the most important interaction have occurred with other individuals (be that another learner or an instructor) around the content - so a mediated content interaction of sorts.
The foundation for this would need to be the open content because without shared content the other kinds of interactions are more difficult.
I wonder how much private learner-learner and learner-instructor interaction is happening around open content.
For example, the open high school may use open content but not make their l-l and l-i interactions around that content open. On the other hand, in Wiley's class - not only is the core content open, but also the l-l and l-i interactions are open.
It makes me wonder about knowledge creating communities - how many are open and how many are closed communities? Also, I wonder about how "open" is being defined in the OCW world. Is it open for consumption only or open for creation also?
@ Charles
It is interesting to me, however, that as open as Wiley's class was (in terms of l-l and l-i interaction) it did not actually materialize into substantial learner-learner and learner-instructor interaction for the distance students.
So the real question in my mind right now is, what does it take to feel community with someone at a distance? Having been in Wiley's class, I think I can make the argument that if we as F2F students had cared about the distance students, they would have been a much greater part of the course.
However, we didn't really feel any community with them. They never really were part of our class. What does it take to overcome that social awkwardness that prevents us from establishing community with people participating from a distance?
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