Posted in July 2013

As educators or (in my case) supporting staff in education, we are all ambitious in supporting our students to learn and excel in what they do. At the same time, every teacher I know has little spare time to design and create educational activities and (especially) materials which match these ambitions. Often it works, but in many cases we don’t have the time to create the materials we envisioned or we don’t really know how.

On the other hand, worldwide thousends of teachers in hundreds of universities have been sharing their educational materials on the Internet, openly available. Open in this case means anybody is free to use, re-use, remix, repurpose and redistribute the educational materials.

Given this fact, I became very curious in how we could (re-)use and repurpose these Open Educational Resourses in formal education settings in a way that benefits students in learning and developing the skills needed in today’s (21st century) society and could benefit teachers in reaching their ambitions as educators.

TU Delft STUMBLE
So we set up the TU Delft STUMBLE project. In this project we’d like to explore this -what I consider to be – interesting question. What I’ve noticed so far is that re-using Open Educational Resources others have shared on the Internet can benefit students in different extents, depending on the level of integration in education:

• simply offer Open Educational Resources as additions to contents covered in lectures provides nice extra’s for students, but seems to be the least effective: students are (and they have every right to) focussed on the course goals as addressed in the final course exams. And the teacher and his or her lectures and contents are key, not contents created by (perhaps top-class) teachers on any other university.
• Teachers can re-use Open Educational Resources shared by others to (up to a certain point) replace the contents he or she wanted to bring across in lectures or educational materials in stead of designing and creating them themselves. As long as students understand the teacher approves and advocates these materials and students know this is the content they will be tested on, this could work. It opens doors to my next point, and perhaps can save some time in respect of developing the course materials themselves.
• What I think could be most beneficial to students, is placing the initiative with students, giving them the lead in finding, judging and relating the contents of Open Educational Resources to the course goals. This way students are actively involved in the learning process and develop important 21st century (perhaps mostly metacognitive) skills.One interesting idea’s I got comes from one of our professors, Prof. Mr. Dr. Ir. Sicco Santema, where students are asked to find course materials related to topics covered in class and bring in arguments about how this relates to the taught subjects. But Youtube Fridays (Colorado School of Mines) and Flipped Classroom models like Peer Instruction (Prof. Eric Mazur, Harvard) offer potential in this respect as well.