Photo credit: leted, CC BY-NC 2.0
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,Changing faces or evolution? In the “The Pedagogy of MOOCs“, Paul Stacey extols the pedagogy employed by the early developers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) who, according to Degree of freedom, extended a connectivist vision by creating an environment in which participants share information and engage in joint teaching and learning experiences through technological social networking.

Here is a video summary of what I’ve learned about open educational resources and my reflections on what I’ve learned.

​No one is happy to find that something they have shared freely, whether it’s a photo, a song, a story, or an idea, is being used by someone else for commercial gain without giving them any credit in words or dollars.

Photo by Helen Haden CC BY-NC 2.0

I watched Vi Hart’s supremely articulated YouTube presentation, Happy “Happy Birthday” Day, with exasperation at how law devised to protect rights is used to infringe on them and exploit them for gain beyond the scope of its intention.

I began reading Dana Boyd’s article “open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals” with skepticism because I couldn’t imagine how a journal could be published freely considering the cost of editing and printing. I knew most of the reviewing was carried out voluntarily by people working in or retired from the field but I hadn’t realized that so much of the editing was also done by volunteers.

Since I have just finished taking a MOOC course I’ve chosen it as the centerpiece of my look at the quality of a MOOC (Table 1) and for comparison to a few others that I haven’t explored in as much depth (Table 2).

I am so profoundly disturbed after watching The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz that I want to scream out to the world about the injustice of the “system” but maybe my scream will only be my action of sending this link to all the thinkers I know.

There are no “textbooks” available for one of the courses I teach as a sessional instructor in the Department Fisheries and Aquaculture at VIU and the resources I use in my classes are up to my discretion. This presents both a burden and an opportunity in the development and delivery of the course and I have embraced open resources as they have become available.