The Learning Environments must also be open in that it creates additional opportunities. The Open Learning Environment is not the result from an Open University; rather, the creation of open learning environments is becoming more common allowing traditional institutions to become more open and thus more competitive with open institutions. Increasingly, technologies are replacing traditional courses and calling into question the entire business model of higher education. All of this is reflected by Randy Bass, Executive Director of Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, who cites data from the National Survey of Student Engagement which notes that “much of what students rate as the most valuable part of their learning experience at college these days takes place outside the traditional classroom” (Young 2011).
The movement into openness in Higher Education is not simply an issue of classrooms; it is also a matter of the organizational structure of the organization. Frank Ostroff (1999) notes the danger of vertical organizations which Higher Ed institutions have in fact become. Often, the joining point of the individual colleges occurs at the level of the Provost. As is obvious, this is not simply the teaching aspect, but every functional level of the institution including research. Thorp and Goldstein (2010) advocate for the need for “open architecture,” arguing that in current higher educational research labs, it has led to a more interdisciplinary environment, and researchers have benefitted from the synergy of crossing disciplinary lines. They note that traditional disciplinary structures in higher education are not useful for attacking big problems due to their narrowness of focus [see INNOVATION and INTERDISCIPLINARY].
For an open university making extensive use of distance education (like SUNY—Empire State College), the means of delivery and design of online learning environment are critical. The traditional LMS (Learning Management Systems) and their associated course packs and externally provided content hyper-structure the course, forcing the students out of the environment, and failing to address long term needs and connections [see LIFELONG LEARNING]. David Wiley (2010) makes a clear parallel between LMSs and current online practices as they “take the approach of hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all student contributed course content at the end of the term. If Facebook worked like Blackboard, every fifteen weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, and unsubscribe you from all your groups. The conceal-restrict-withhold-delete strategy is not an effective way to build a thriving learning community.”
The nature of most LMSs implies that the value of the course is on the content materials with the social networking and assessment emerging from it—it is based on factual knowledge as opposed to skill sets or abilities[1]. The value of a course is not in the content—if it was, students would simply but the text at the beginning of the term and read it—it would be a much better bargain for them and they would still get content. Students pay tuition to interact with a faculty member. They want the best minds in the business to work with them. That is what the course needs to be built around.
MOOCs are a great example of an Open Learning Environment. A participant gets the best of all form a huge “crowd.” Those who want to pursue the assessment and engage in a deeper participation have the ability to—the open learning environment allows each individual to meet their own learning goals.
Open Learning Environments do not occur simply online, but can be developed in physical spaces as well. For that to happen, the classroom (which is itself a negotiable term) is the starting point of learning, not the only place. The walls of a classroom should exist only to keep out inclement weather, they should not be there to keep out other learning, and not just formalized learning. If a student is looking up what’s being discussed on Google that’s great—don’t take away their lap top to listen to you. If they have out their cell phone and texting, they could be fact checking. If they’re chatting with friends, don’t force them to put it away, make the class interesting enough for them to listen to you instead of chatting. We have all sat in committee and other meetings in Higher Education meeting, bored to tears, wondering why we are there, wishing we could be elsewhere. In those instances, it is not because the topic is irrelevant or insignificant, but the nature of discussion or the presentation is framed to exclude our learning and attention styles. If we experience that in our jobs, how do you think that student feels in the classroom. Give them something worth tweeting!
The classroom itself is an endangered idea. In her powerful work Now You See It, Cathy Davidson notes that if Ichabod Crane were to return today, with the exception of the computer in the corner, he would be perfectly at home in our contemporary classrooms (ok, personally, I think he’d have a hard time with the fashion, but that’s another less relevant issue). A classroom does not need to be a lecture hall or room set up with all chairs facing forward (allowing chairs to be arranged to discuss in groups doesn’t quite cut it either). Ask yourself what the focus of the student’s attention is meant to be in that room. Is the room designed so their attention is on a person; is a person the only thing a person can learn from? More importantly, nothing says that the classroom has to be in a campus building modeled on the structure of Bell Labs during World War II. There are many (if not most) coffee shops in the US that are better designed as learning environments than are our classrooms (just as most video games are better designed as learning environments than are our online courses). Students now come equipped with learning devices (the argument that students can’t learn from them comes from people who have yet to learn how to use them themselves[2]) which need to be exploited—we don’t get a donkey to pull a car.
So what does it mean to break down the walls? It is not simply about giving formal homework. Why not inspire students to leave the classroom and learn. Not learning under directions, but discovering what they need to learn and how to learn it. When we’re teaching composition courses, realize that most of the writing and communication that a student will do in their life time will not be based on an assigned topic with a specified mode, but the discovery of the what and the how is as important as the content itself. Creating a formalized assignment robs the student of the opportunity to develop skills in critical parts of what they should be learning as well as reduces their freedom to learn.
This is a call to guerilla teaching! Create learning activities that pervade student’s lives. Think about podcasts that students can listen to in the gym. Think about virtual office hours where students can reach you in your living room and model the ideal that the learning experience should transcend formalized learning time. There are many brilliant and extremely successful means to create learning opportunities. Walls do not frame my life; why should they frame my life as a learner.
[1] There is a danger in factual knowledge versus ability. The structural quantitative measure is easier to rationalize and saves us time form explaining; however, does it always measure the true learning outcomes. If we require someone to take a course in ethics, it is (hopefully) our intent that a student learns and applies the principles to their life to make them a more ethical individual. However, it is perfectly possible to be sub par on one’s ethics, never used or plan to use them, and still get a perfect test on an ethics course. We need to look at learning environments to assess beyond the content.
[2] I believe it was Edmund Wilson who said that “those who dislike the classics merely admit their lack of familiarity with the classics.” The parallel of rejecting computers for learning reminds one of Plato’s rejection of writing, or the wonderful scene at the beginning of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame where it is explained that higher education is being destroyed by printed books.
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