Block 2 is free!

[Andrea]

After years and years of lobbying, I've just had notification that the whole of Block 2 will be available for free on OpenLearn!

This is a major boost to my strategy of making the study of systems thinking and practice truly 'open' within the Open University -- students will be able to study my block at their own pace and, when ready, have the option to sign up to T214 for polishing off their understanding (through the support of fellow students and tutors), be assessed, and gain official accreditation. This is a radical departure from the current use of OpenLearn which is mostly composed of dated materials or incomplete fragments of live courses.

Revolutionary business model for part-time distance learning .....or will it scare off everybody when they realise the radical nature of Block 2?!

[llamagirl]

thats good news. As well as being part of the process of attracting people to sign up for T214, I'm sure there must be many people who would like to study but don't want the pressure of timescales and assessements!

[Teiana]

yeeeeeeeeeee ha! fab news.

[Neill]

Congratulations Andrea.

But ... how easy is Block 2 with no support.
I think those of us who got a lot from the block did partly/largely because of the forums.
People doing the free version will have no one to turn to when confused.
Will this maybe reduce the effectiveness of the "open" version?

Just a thought.
Neill

[Andrea]

But ... how easy is Block 2 with no support.
I think those of us who got a lot from the block did partly/largely because of the forums.
People doing the free version will have no one to turn to when confused.
Will this maybe reduce the effectiveness of the "open" version?

Yes, this could be a problem, but I repeatedly turn to examples of the development and support of open source software for the answer: if the enterprise is worthwhile, there will be a community out there who will readily provide support and even directly improve the material. For example, we've recently been developing a very ambitious website using Drupal, and it's amazing to see how fast the responses have been to our queries......

If the community doesn't develop around this initiative, then even that will be useful feedback. It'll mean that I'll have to rethink the material. The OU has been "dumping" a lot of material on OpenLearn with limited or no feedback getting back to the original producers -- I see that as a missed opportunity for getting some crucial "market intelligence".

[Karen]

Good news! But will it have some impact on the fees for the course that includes the 'free' material?

[Teiana]

Good news! But will it have some impact on the fees for the course that includes the 'free' material?

if you buy a sandwich from a sandwich shop, do you pay for..

the bread, butter, and filling..
the bread, butter, filling, and wrapping...
the bread, butter, filling, wrapping, and convenience of not having had to make it yourself..
the knowledge that you have partly paid the wages of the person who made it..
or.. what?

we're back to the question of when you pay for a course, what is it that you pay for? Is it printed material ( making online courses look bad value: some people can't cope if they haven't been sent big textbooks to look full of value), or is it access to the material, or access to the tutors, or getting work marked, or getting results back, some people might argue that what you pay for with a course is the qualification, not the materials...

i think the days of it being 'being sent reams of printed matter' that made something worth paying for are over...people aren't buying the encyclopedia brittannica so much as using wikipedia instead.. it's possible that eventually the content of ALL courses will somehow have found its way onto the internet whether legally or not.. there's no point hanging on to the idea that people will pay for course materials - we need to sell the service instead.. support, tutoring, the less tangible but more valuable things..

i remember people saying alan sugar had said nobody would ever pay for software.. it was the computers they were buying.. disastrous call for amstrad, and great news for microsoft that he was wrong..

[Andrea]

i think the days of it being 'being sent reams of printed matter' that made something worth paying for are over..... there's no point hanging on to the idea that people will pay for course materials - we need to sell the service instead.. support, tutoring, the less tangible but more valuable things..

I totally agree. Using "Block 2 language" : the transition that needs to take place is a move away from buying 'objects' (course materials, tutor's time, qualifications, etc) to being engaged in a 'process'. In other words, what you're paying for is a coordinated experience which uses a range of components (written texts, discussion fora, tutor's advice and assessment, online activities, access to fellow students, interventions from course team members etc) to maximise everybody's learning (and I'm not only referring to students here). This was my biggest challenge when I originally developed Block 2 -- I didn't just want to produce a whole load of written text and then assume that it's reading would constitute the students' learning experience. I instead wanted to orchestrate the interaction of a whole range of components -- drawing inspiration from what happens in conventional universities where learning occurs in a thousand different ways and evolves very rapidly from year to year.

Releasing Block 2's content onto OpenLearn won't invalidate the official 'T214 Block 2 learning experience'. It will, however, allow people to get a head start so that the actual official experience doesn't have to be so stressed and manic .

There's also something about the "slow burn" nature of some of its content -- I expect that some people won't realise it's significance until quite some time has passed (it took me 20 years to come up with it so it's a bit unfair to expect people to totally get it in just eight weeks ). I don't think it's because it's complicated or factually overloaded -- more because of the way it questions deep-seated beliefs and values in a way that one sees the world....so an OpenLearn 'vaccination' might help people get over the official infection (this also partially explains my participation on this forum )

[Andrea]

It's finally sinking in. After almost 8 years of battling with the OU's "traditional" approach to producing and delivering distance teaching, I'm beginning to get really excited about the implications of having Block 2 on OpenLearn. I think I will finally have the freedom to break away once and for all from the linear narrative style of teaching, and create a learning experience which is by itself a complex adaptive system.

It's always intrigued me why we have continued to teach systems using the very un-systemic traditional approach. It's something that has always jarred with my sense of 'walking the talk'. In response to my perplexity, a colleague once told me that "students just aren't ready for it". So, if students aren't ready for it, then who is supposed to encourage this shift?! I thought that universities were supposed to get people ready to engage constructively with future challenges? I suspect that this colleague was hoping that somebody else would stick their neck out and get all the aggro

If a learning experience can be designed as a complex adaptive system for kids doing mathematics (ttp://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynum ... nce_en.pdf) it surely can't be that hard to get grown-ups to engage with "emergent learning".....


http://www.masternewmedia.org/bye-bye-e ... ery-tools/

[Teiana]

there's something i want to explore a bit and i don't know if this is the right thread but i have a vision of a parallel between this and something else. hang on i'm eating a chicken sandwich and it's making it hard to type, i'll be right back...