Open EdTech 2009 and OEIT
The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia) has hosted a meeting for the last two years bringing together “open, educational and technology experts that [get] together to share best practices, as the basis for discussions to help identify future education and technology needs and trends for next-generation educational and learning environments.”
The 2009 meeting ended with an OET communiqué: Create the University of the Future.
The goal, to:
establish a new kind of university—one free from preconceptions or official constraints about how it would operate. The mandate of this new university was to provide an excellent education in an environment of open access, built on four key ideas:
- Access to high-quality education should be available to all, and open content is a key part of providing such access.
- Informal learning and mentoring are effective and well-proven approaches to engaging with youth and stimulating critical thought.
- Personalized learning is critical to student success, but will require learning standards that allow students to continue their learning wherever life takes them.
- Tools such as digital video, mobile devices, social media, and the global network all have important roles in learning and should be available to all learners.
New Media Consortium and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. (2009). OET communiqué: Create the University of the Future. Retrieved on November 16, 2009 from Web site: http://pretoria.uoc.es/wpmu/OpenEdTech_2009/files/2009/11/oet_09_communique.pdf
Looking at the document, I’d like to suggest a more practice focused interpretation of the call to action. We need to:
- Develop rich media that is designed to be multimodal (language, platform, media type).
- Develop content for mobile use from the outset.
- Implement credentialing that is based on learning outcome (not just by taking a specific course at a university).
- Understand that sharing must be part of the culture of teaching and learning.
- Understand that context and “pedagogical wrappers” are as important as content.
What does this mean for OEIT? These are all things “we” should be working toward. And I do believe that the individual projects, that maybe will form “the next big thing”, are all moving in these directions.
