Media, Technology & Open Learning

This course covers different forms of media used for instruction, about how they can be produced and disseminated, and about the technologies that help and hinder the process of understanding. This course will explore how media, text, and technology intersect and will benefit students who anticipate authoring or sharing instructional media and texts as well as those who anticipate using or managing materials authored by others in an instructional context. We will focus on issues related to the open learning movement (open courseware, open software, open educational resources), through which technology is used to make instructional media and texts available to a wide audience. We will cover technologies used to create and share media/texts and concerns related to copyright, authorship and sharing.

Open Learning is a movement employing technology to make instructional texts and media available to global audiences. At the heart of open learning are the subsequent “opens,” like Open Content, Open Courseware, Open Source Software, and Open Knowledge. With open used in so many different ways, digital management becomes a huge concern. How do copyright and intellectual property rights come into play? Who is considered the author of open materials? How does sharing and adapting course materials work? This class was full of must-know information for educators, including the answers to these questions. We further discussed and wrote about Creative Commons licensing, open licensing, digital repositories, digital learning objects, and social information networks, among other aspects of the movement.

The term open in the context of learning and education is quite complex, which is perhaps the reason educators don’t know more about the open learning movement. What’s great about all things open is the community that comes together in the process. For example, perhaps an author has a great amount of content knowledge, but knows little about pedagogy. Support communities encourage authors to post content while contributors make the content better. Appropriately designing instruction can be difficult, and that’s where the communities come in.

I wrote several papers and reflections for Media, Technology, and Open Learning. I am also including these written discussions because these show my ability to compile the information, analyze, and question the various topics.