Since my university joined the "University of Life"-wave it has kind of been in the cards that the language of teaching should be English and open to a wider group of international students. Higher education has since been continuously forced to find new sources of income to replace budget cuts. This it is difficult without compromising the integrity. Or as the engineer joke goes: "You can get the job done fast, cheap, and well done - but you can only choose two of the options!" This principle however evades quite a few management systems - and I suspect there could be a moral loophole to sort of get all 3 (such as thinning down the integrity).
One quite obvious movement towards meeting these budget cuts is that universities and even students put their heads and resources together across the borders to create the tools that are too heavy to design alone. The especially true for small universities like my own. Creating free teaching materials seems to be an powerful way of meeting both lecturers, students, and the universities limited resources.
Before I continue I wish to share a small anecdote from reality related to what I wrote previously: "Change must come through the barrel of a gun!" - when push comes to shove, the creative mind kicks in.
A female acquaintance working in the military as a programmer was invited to play a war game with the officers some years ago. She was put in charge of a country and set to handle the simulated conflicts. The officers were unaware that she was a very experienced role-player and played to win - with a twist. Before she won the war game she was presented with the dilemma: "Your motorized transports have stopped their progress due to unforeseen technical complications caused by weather conditions in the enemy territory." To this she answered her adviser: "My Brother, shoot one of the engineers and tell the rest they got one hour to solve the problem, or the next one will be shot. Continue to do so until the problem is solved! Live Magnolia, home of peace and harmony!"
The will to survive is a hard point to argue with, regardless if it is your desire to breathe or your accumulated academic efforts.
So, what have people come up with to solve the designing of teaching materials in collaboration and openly accessible to students?
One well known platform is the Wikibooks, which I briefly mentioned previously. One critiqued element of this platform is that anyone can edit it. This can be considered a problem if you wish to ensure a specific integrity of the material - or there are specific points where the scientific community is polarized about ("creation" just to take an obvious one). Another problem is the static book-form of the material. The linear setup of a normal book is replicated in the Wikibooks. This can be a problem if you want to pick-and-choose elements for your specific course.
Recently I found the Connexions website through a presentation by Richard Baraniuk. This platform seems a bit more advanced for university teachings. It is also open-source and the material is creative commons. Students can read online or order books that are published on demand (thus 1/5 of the normal price of an education book). Writers can add material as modules which allow flexibility when teachers are putting together text material particularly for your course. And best of all, you can create a so called "lens" that fits your institution for quality control. The lens is a predefined peer-review process of people and institutions that checks the content of the material.
A final observation is that if we are to meet students where they learn today, not even reading is sufficient alone. Visualisation is imperative especially to children and especially now when we have a generation accustomed to have high density information taken visually.
Visual Learning Systems (AKA Kahn Academy) has taken this full step. Making the module based step by step learning from the lowest grades to high school/college. This is unfortunately a commercial platform so only the financially privileged can use it. Other sporadic initiatives are springing up globally, but still fairly unorganized. In Estonia, Chemicum is already working similar concepts in chemistry on its own (thanks Tõiv), but we need a way to build it in a modular form on an open platform. Frankly this is where the universities should be already - an open source visual learning platform!
I think creating and using online education material, for free, is a necessary step for higher education. Also to attract students to the university. Educated mentors will still be needed. They need to free their hands from paper shuffling and do what they should do with the students - learn!
I love holding and reading books as the next geek, but in reality the era of books being the only source is already past. As written before this is also needed if we really wish to lift education in developing countries. This is the fastest and cheapest way to get the knowledge there!
Now I just hope our university will choose one, and just one, platform. Have spine to force it into action, educate its staff to use it and stick with it!
Richard Baraniuk on open-source learning:
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