Disrupting the University

Katie Hafner's recent NYTimes article An Open Mind, answered some concerns I had had about students learning through free, online courses such as those offered through the M.I.T. OpenCourseWare Initiative.  

One of my concerns was that students accessing these courses as independent learners would have no one to answer their questions or reply to their reflections. One solution to this concern is answered at the Peer 2 Peer University.  Peer 2 Peer University, which is a tuition-free nonprofit experiment financed with seed money from the Hewlett and Shuttleworth foundations.  At P2PU a 'course organizer' leads the discussion but you are working with others so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers.  Ability to network with others taking the same course could be extremely helpful.  It sounds as if you could even create online study groups.

Another site which pulls together open courses from various universities and encourages students interaction is the University of the People.  According to Kafner's article, students not only interact, but  students even grade one another's papers!  My reaction - Why not?  In my own teaching experience I've found that given a good rubric to follow, students usually grade each other very effectively and sometimes even offer good, constructive feedback.

My other concern with open educational resources was accreditation.  Students may accrue a great deal of knowledge, but if they don't receive any official certification of this knowledge would it ultimately be useful to them for job-seeking purposes?  Both Peer 2 Peer University and the University of the People do not at the present time offer accreditation, but both seem to be in the process of seeking to offer it in the future.   It's a wonderful world!

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge

Tangled Web by Gruno Girin

There will be an exciting experiment of an open online course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in Septmeber. The details of the course show that it covers the following topics through various techological means:
Week 1: What is Connectivism?
Week 2: Rethinking epistemology: Connective knowledge
Week 3: Properties of Networks
Week 4: History of networked learning
Week 5: Connectives and Collectives: Distinctions between networks and
groups
Week 6: Complexity, Chaos and Research
Week 7: Instructional design and connectivism
Week 8: Power, control, validity, and authority in distributed environments
Week 9: What becomes of the teacher? New roles for educators
Week 10: Openness: social change and future directions
Week 11: Systemic change: How do institutions respond?
Week 12: The Future of Connectivism

I'm very much looking forward to the course which starts in September. However, since my own courses start at that time, I'm trying to do as much reading as possible beforehand.

Online EFL Teaching

I have long wanted to do some online EFL teaching, and now there are many sites which facilitate that. Talkbean is one such site. The company posted a job description on the TESOL site. Personally, the time commitment of everyday discouraged me. I would like to do some tutoring but just 2-3 times a week. I'm going to investigate other sites from a list I received from Meri Aaron Walker's site called mawstoolbox as well as Myngle.

Each of these sites offers connections of teachers and students through the use of webcams, whiteboards and chat technologies. So not only conversational language skills can be developed, but reading and writing as well.

The whole concept of connecting language teachers with students who can benefit from intereaction with native speakers is a concept that holds a lot of promise.