This week in an Australian first, a group of 40 educators gathered alongside instructional designers, developers, graphic designers and marketing experts for a Tech-a-thon; a special event targeted at the education industry. The aim of the Tech-a thon was to help educators navigate through the murky depths of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), one of the latest trends in eLerning facing schools, training providers and educators to date.
MOOC stands for massive open online course and allows unlimited participation and open access via the web for students. In addition to the traditional course materials that education institutions use, like filmed lecture slides, readings, problem sets etc, MOOCs also provide interactive forums to support community interactions between students, trainers, professors and teaching assistants.
Popularity in MOOCs has steadily risen over the last year due to increasing investments into the education technology sector and the growing popularity in software like Blackboard and Moodle, which allow students to access learning resources and tutorials from anywhere, at the click of a button.
However, CEO and co-founder for OpenLearning Australia Adam Brimo, believes that while MOOCs and the open learning sphere hold exciting opportunities for the future of education, many educators are still cautious to embrace them.
“This is a relatively new world and one of the barriers we have found in bringing more educators into online learning is a fear of the unknown,” he said.
“Some of the most prolific educators we have reached out to have never run online courses and we want to show them how MOOCs and social learning are different to traditional eLearning courses delivered via a learning or student management system.”
This became the basis for the Tech-a-thon; participants learnt the basics of how to set up a profile on OpenLearning, how to create a course, how to structure the course content, how to engage in different types of activities, and then how to implement those within the platform.
“Having our educators, our training providers and managers of our student and learning management systems be across open learning is crucial to the future of the education sector. The way students learn and the way educators teach is changing.
There is more emphasis on student empowerment, active learning and meaningful learning for students, and also learning through a community. MOOCs allow us to facilitate that,” Brooke Hahn, chief learning officer at OpenLearning said of the event.
Indeed, a recent study in the U.S revealed that more than $1.8 billion of private equity investment has gone into the education technology sector in the past year. This investment has spurred on the arrival of hundreds of new video learning companies, marketplaces, online learning tools and interactive academic education companies. It has also caused an explosion of written content, published in blogs and articles, which are all generally easy to find and curate with mobile tools, social media and various products that recommend content.
Josh Bersin, founder and principal of Bersin & Associates says that learning today is learner-driven. Meaning that courses and content can now be found in a variety of places, which is accessible to students at any time they need it.
“ It’s gotten to the stage where most peoples’ expectations have been raised so high that if we can’t find a video explaining the concept or problem we’re tying to address, we tend to give up after a couple of minutes,” he said.
Bersin & Associates specialise in developing and researching new learning and operational strategies to help organisations improve their business performance. Bersin says he has already spoken to many of his clients who are looking for ways to tap into these content sources and provide accessible professional development for their staff.
“Many of our companies see the potential of this learner driven market and are starting to build their own learning platforms so staff can find and use content as needed for their own personal learning,” he said.
While these technological developments prove very exciting for students and the future of learning, how will these changes affect educators- our teachers, trainers and more importantly our schools, universities and RTOs?
As the market continues to rely more heavily on eLearning and continues to develop new technological platforms to cater to student’s needs, our education systems need to be at the forefront of this growing change. In an interview with The Australian, Dr Hugh Bradlow, Chief Technology Officer for Telstra, emphasised the significant benefits online education offers its students, namely the flexibility and the ability to share engaging content such as video.
Meanwhile, statistics from the 2014 UES report found that only 57% of all students surveyed who were enrolled across all traditionally based courses, were satisfied with the level of ‘learner engagement’ that they received. Regardless of whether open learning and MOOCs are the answer, the findings reveal the need for a more diverse range of courses and institutions in higher education and the eLearning market is primed to deliver this.
“We feel that there are so many benefits open learning can provide us and we believe the best way to demonstrate this and bring both the institutions and the teachers on board is through educating them, this is why this Tech-a-thon has been so important,” Hahn said.
Formal feedback was collected from the Tech-a-thon and according to Hahn was positive overall, with a number of teachers, developers and learning professionals saying they were going back to their respective organisations to discuss the benefits of investing in more open learning options.
OpenLearning have also announced they will be holding another Tech-a-thon event at the beginning of next year.
To find out more about OpenLearning click here: http://au.educationhq.com/news/33129/timely-teach-a-thon/
To have a closer look at the 2014 UES report click here: https://www.education.gov.au/university-experience-survey