Feature

The Impact of Openness on the Future of Education

Ruxana Hossain

RECENTLY I attended a symposium on Teaching and Learning with Technology at State College, Pennsylvania. I found the keynote speech by Dr. David Wiley on The Impact of Openness on the Future of Higher Education very fascinating and would like to share some of his thoughts with others.

David Wiley is an Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of reusable educational resources and the founder of OpenContent.org.

Dr. Wiley described the impact of Internet access on education. He said students come to school mainly for four reasons: content (access to teaching materials, text books, research materials or journals), support services (support from teachers and academic counselors), social life (to meet people and to make friends), and degrees (recognition from a third party or credentials to get a job). However, according to Dr. Wiley, without physically going to school, online exposure can meet the needs of students in all four areas.

Now, students can get high quality content from many websites, like-- Open course Wares, Wikipedia, the public library of science, Google scholar and flat world knowledge. These are free and have open access for everybody. In terms of support services, Cha-cha, Yahoo! Answers, Rate My Professor, Email, Instant messaging, Twitter are providing answers to any kind of questions. If a text message question is sent by cell phones to Cha-cha, it answers within less than 60 seconds. Yahoo! answer replies to millions of questions in a year. Teenagers now feel more comfortable socializing on Facebook, MMOG or MySpace rather than meeting people personally. What about students' receiving credit for learning done in nontraditional environments? There are a few online degrees, especially in the technical area, like MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer), RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) or CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate), are preferable for some particular jobs than regular university graduate degrees. Hence, the Internet now fulfills the sufficient conditions that educational institutions provide us.

How did the idea of openness occur to David Wiley? Dr. Wiley taught an online course at Utah State University. In the beginning of the course he found five people about whom the registrar had never heard. Dr. Wiley let them fully participate and they joined discussions with the 15 or so regular students. Dr. Wiley then opened his class for everybody. As a result, he got students from all over the world by having them participate through blogging and interactions online to broaden the ideas and perspectives of different countries. For the students' homework or assignments, Dr. Wiley, created an open blog that was accessible to all. Anybody could read and comment on the students' assignment. As people from outside the class, could read the assignments, Dr. Wiley found that the students became more careful about their writings. The students' writing on the second day, were longer and more thoughtful than that of the first day. The quality of their work improved without any kind of pressure from the tutor. The unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit, but they did end up with a homemade certificate signed by Mr. Wiley.

Dr. Wiley is the founder of open content.org and is working to establish openness in the education. He is advocating for educational materials and resources to be offered freely and openly for anyone to use with the license of modifying it.

Dr. Wiley gave some examples of openness. MIT Open Course Ware provides whole set of online courses to students, which is open for contents, quizzes or exams. He talked about an interactive 3D instructional computer game, HEAT, which provides the necessary training and background to effectively handle a similar scenario in a real-life environment. Hundreds of universities around the globe are sharing over 6,000 courses through Open 1.0. In Stanford University, there are 10 free engineering courses online in which students can hold discussions with one another and watch streaming lectures. Open Educational Resource (OER) provides high quality instructional materials to students and teachers. Western Governor's University is an online university that provides only performance-based assessment, it does not care how many credits the students have or from which universities they are coming. If the students pass the assessment test, then they get the degree and become valuable to many employers.

Wiley believes that education needs to align itself with the changes in both society and students. Dr. David Wiley believes if universities cannot find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them and the impacts of technology and openness in the economy then universities will be irrelevant by 2020.

Attending that session of the symposium raised many questions in my mind. What will the educational institutions look like in 21st century? Are we ready to handle the change? What kind of policy reform is needed? Is online exposure into teaching and learning going to increase the gap between rural and urban or rich and poor context and countries, or will it be a platform to interact and bring all students of the world in the same classroom?

(Ruxana Hossain is a staff of BRAC Education Program)