After reviewing this weekā€™s readings, Teaching Online ā€“ A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice by Major and Openness and Education: A beginnersā€™ guide by Jordan and Keller, I started thinking about what open education meant for me and how these articles widened my views about it.Ā 

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 Majorā€™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 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 was uncertain about the reason but the lack of social interaction and accountability were definitely a couple of 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 might positively affect higher education.

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. I believe while designing your own course, one must focus on studentsā€™ needs first, then think about the other aspects of design after. While itā€™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.

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online ā€“ 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 beginnersā€™ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.