After reviewing this week’s readings, Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice by Major and Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide by Jordan and Keller, I started thinking about what open and distributed education meant for me and how these articles widened my views about it. 

My idea about open education was that it is accessible to anyone and students can learn at their own pace at the location that works for them. I was amazed to learn from Major’s book about how Massive Open Online Courses evolved and it reminded me of my experience with one of these types of courses. In the last few years I have been looking for courses that were online, asynchronous, affordable and also accessible on a specific topic. I researched many days and hours until I came across Coursera. I previously had taken an online course through Thompson River University with not much success; however, this time it was the topic why I signed up for. I was able to take a course in Spanish on a specific subject and would earn a certificate at the end. While the course was manageable, accessible to anyone and interesting, I failed to finish it. I learned that many of my collegues and peers had the same experience when I asked them about this topic. Some said that the lack of deadlines and the structure of the course was the main reason of quitting. While I was uncertain about my reason, the lack of social interaction and accountability were definitely amongst them. While these courses are criticized according to Major for the possibility of creating inequity among students, they also offer many future possibilities for course design and came a long way since they were introduced. As teachers are committed to life-long professional development and overall enjoy learning, if I enrolled in a MOOC now, I would probably complete it only if the topic was high interest to me and would benefit my practice, and/or it was for credits.

By reading about the structural elements of online courses, such as amount of online portion, the timing of student-teacher interaction, pathways of learning and learning platform used, gave me a better understanding of the different ways courses can be built and that an instructor, acting as a designer, might create a course according to his/her perspective. I found it interesting to read about the experiences some of the professors had with their courses and it made me think about my own teaching practices. When I began my career feeling overwhelmed with all types of resources, I thought I had all the tools I need to start on a good foot. While this was true, the tools and resources were not quite enough to create meaningful learning experiences for my students. With the support of peers, friends, mentor teachers, past professors and the online communities we constantly learn from each other by sharing Open Education Resources and creating new ones for the benefit of our students.This support encouraged me to design my own course using OERs that prioritizes my students’ needs. I believe while designing your own course, one must focus on students’ needs first, then think about the other aspects of design after. While it’s not questionable that face-to-face instruction has its advantages; however, the benefits of blended learning far outweigh those of face-to-face instruction. In my opinion, depending on the context, K-12 or higher education, course design highly varies and similar to calling teaching as an art, instructors and teachers have the flexibility and responsibility to design courses that work best for their audience.

During one of my contracts, I had a chance to learn about the different aspects of Distributed Learning and I gained another perspective of this type of setting. Without any previous experience in a DL setting, I had to learn a new LMS, Brightspace, communication tools like Zoom, learn about the nature of the course and try to create a learning community with over 200 students asynchronously. It seemed as an impossible task; however, with the support of teachers and some training, I was able to manage my course successfully. While it wasn’t perfect and as myself and DL has long ways too go, this experience gave me a different perspective on asynchronous online courses and I feel that I have a better understanding of them not only as a student but as a teacher as well which helps me to shape my own practice as well.

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 76-108)

Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017). Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.