Essay On Role Of Education In National Reconstruction

As illustrated by the current debate on “Flipped Classroom” (see for instance Reich, 2012), openness (here in the form of open access and OER), is more or less taken for granted and questions like “What is the best use of our class time? Moreover, as demonstrated in the recently emerged phenomenon “Massive Open Online Courses” (MOOC), more and more people from all over the world capitalise on openness in various forms (e.g. Yet research seems to be more inspired by new models of learning such as connectivism (Siemens, 2005), which also regards openness as a commonly agreed prerequisite.However, as this call insinuates, there is (still) a considerable lack of clarity concerning the breath and the depth of openness in education and indeed there has been some rather pragmatic solutions to define openness.This knowledge will then be integrated into a systematic framework that can inform current debates (Flipped Classroom, MOOC) in a more balanced way.

Resources created by educators and researchers should be open for anyone to use and reuse.

Ultimately this argument resonates with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: ‘Everyone has the right to education.

Indeed, it has been called the “o(pen-decade” (Materu, 2004) and there has been a plethora of open-terms such as “Open Scholar”, “Open Professor”, or “Open Assessment”, i.e.

core business components are relabelled in order to align them to the overall openness movement which is characterised as a political and a social project (Peters, 2008).

For instance, the OECD report “Giving knowledge for free” (Hylen, 2006) differentiates three areas of openness that are perceived to make a difference for education (technical and social characteristics, and the nature of the resources) which are in a way tracing back the trends as far as technological aspects (Open Sources Software) are concerned.

Wiley and Gurrell (2009), present a historical sketch of the idea of OER, which also puts much emphasis on technological aspects (legal issues are also covered but to a minor degree).

In the context of education, "open(ness)" has become the watermark for a fast growing number of learning materials and associated platforms and practices from a variety of institutions and individuals.

Open Educational Resources (OER), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), and more recently, initiatives such as Coursera are just some of the forms this movement has embraced under the "open" banner.

Eventual gradual restrictions imposed on outsider access lead to the rise of cathedral (and later municipal) schools run by secular clergy, thus greatly thrusting education in the public sphere (Riddle, 1993).

As participation rose, students themselves started seeking out scholars and knowledge.