This afternoon I attended the monthly gathering of the UNSW Network of Faculty Educational Developers (UNFED), during which I delivered a short 10 minute presentation on Open Education followed by another 25 minutes of group discussion on the matter. We recorded the session in its entirety and I have uploaded the result to Archive.org.
An embedded instance is also included above, or you can download the full recording here (32 MB MP3) or as an Ogg file here (23 MB).
The presentation was accompanied by a brief series of slides, containing links to a variety of supplemental resources on open education – including a few key dates in the history of the movement, an overview of two emerging schools of thought, some examples of OpenEd in practice, and finally a series of questions provided to hopefully inspire discussion and debate.
Strangely I found myself absolutely petrified during the presentation, which caught me off guard since I haven’t experienced stage fright during any of the last few presentations I’ve done. An unfortunate by-product of this nervousness was the fact I inadvertently focused too much on the content elements of open education, including sharing, reuse, and OERs, and not enough on the cultural elements. This is absolutely what I didn’t want to do heading into it. Quite the contrary in fact, I wanted to make the point that open education is far more than resources and platforms.
Presentations are not one of my strong points unfortunately, and in this case I felt things didn’t go off as well as I’d hoped they would. The amount of discussion that took place aftwards was quite nice though – and you could tell that people were starting to consider the implications of it all. There was also a fairly broad spectrum of opinion on the matter, ranging from open education sympathisers like myself to hardcore skeptics who questioned the logic of giving away uni materials for free, especially when schools are being asked to demonstrate a “sufficient return on investment.” All in all there was a healthy mix of viewpoints.
