OpenEd Week 15: Wrap up

Thanks to Dr. Wiley for providing such a new learning environment for us and fully considering our comments of course content and processing. As a beginner in this field and an international student, it is very hard at the beginning to read through all the articles in each week’s reading; because firstly, there are so many new vocabularies need to be checked in the dictionary; secondly, open education is a very new subject in developing countries like China, some newer vocabularies or terms haven’t translated into Chinese yet. I need to fully understand the concepts in English to know what their meanings are in my language. I would donate my own translation on Wikipedia for those new terms haven’t got any translation yet.

Before this class, I have heard of the terms such as open education, open courseware, license, compulsory education, etc. I didn’t have much clue on most of them or even I got the wrong definitions. At the end of this class, my definitions for those terms are totally refreshed, and more, I learn some other terms such as learning object, Creative Commons, public domain, GFDL licenses, ShareAlike, sustainability of OER, Economic Models of Open Education, etc. Also, I got a chance to study a little bit on some open education projects and made some comparison. A few topics of open education in developing countries like China are mentioned in the class content which are very interesting for me. I don’t have to list all the details of each one now since we already had good discussions earlier.

The understanding of the new terms is very useful for the translation work I am having now. And some of my future courses will definitely have some relationship with this class. Open education is a hot topic all over the world now; open education movement just started in China. There are many problems and obstacles will be faced during the process, and I would like to contribute to my own country in this field as much as I can in the future.

I would hardly think something does not covered in this class, but seems like the last part of class about the localization needs more discussion. And also I think maybe some topics about open education models in other countries besides only in the U.S. if there are any because as a class with so many international students, we may want to know more about what happened in other parts of the world. On the process side, there were too many readings at the beginning, so maybe change the process like the later part on the syllabus is more helpful to the students. It is good to remove the audio recording which some students are not very comfortable with. A small project is a good idea to be put into this class about open education, but two weeks for both design and feedback might be considered, three weeks sounds more appropriate.

At last, I would again thanks to Dr. Wiley and all my classmates who participate in the class discussion and giving comments. This class is for sure a good experience for me; useful content is not the only thing I’ve learned in this class, more than that, I feel a lot involved and being supported by the instructor and classmates than any other class. Let’s keep up supporting each other in our later study or work.