Webinar recording: How open education will revolutionize higher education

Last Tuesday I did a Contact North webinar on the above topic. This was the last of five webinars based on my book, Teaching in a Digital Age.

In this webinar, I briefly touched on the following topics that are more extensively covered in Chapter 10 of the book:

• open textbooks
• open research and open data
• OER and MOOCs
• modularization of learning
• disaggregation of services
• new course designs that exploit open educational resources.

My main argument in the webinar is that we are moving to a point where (nearly) all academic and other content will be open, free and easily accessible online. There is no need for subject experts to select and package knowledge for students. Indeed, in a knowledge-based society, we need to teach those skills to students, so that they can continue to learn after graduating. Such a move though radically changes the role of faculty and instructors, and of course demands appropriate changes in course design.

I also raised these two questions throughout the webinar:

• why are faculty and instructors not making greater use of open resources?
• what can be done to improve the quality of open educational resources so that they will be used more?

I also ended the webinar by asking participants the following questions:

1. How could you design your courses to make better use of open resources?
2. What stops universities from collaborating more in the design and use of open educational resources?
3. How could open education change the way we offer programs?

A recording of the webinar (56 minutes) can be downloaded here: http://tinyurl.com/zrd6fx6