Jesper Augustsson

OK, so Open Learning – Sharing and Openness then. Let’s start with what openness means for my own teaching. Up until a year ago, I pretty much ripped off and used just about any material I wanted and could get my hands on in my courses. It could be a YouTube video, a song on Spotify or a figure or model from an internet page. It didn’t really matter because my courses and its content were not public so no laws of copyright were broken, the way I saw it. Then I began my YouTube channel and started to put my lectures on YT as well as in my courses. It was an unintentional and a bit immature way of open publishing you might say. I knew that my YT videos could not contain material that was copyrighted so my approach when it came to producing video lectures started to change. This was because I did not want to make two lectures on more or less the same subject. So therefore, in the process my closed university courses lectures have become cleaner when it comes to the subject of copyri...

Hi all, So the Friday 13 March David White webseminar was great I think. The hierarchy system (the normal academic system) in which in which students are ranked by an authority (me as teacher) vs the network system in which students collaborate, connect and communicate with each other. While I do feel like it is a bit too radical to swing the pendulum to full connectivism (“It never works” David W emphasized), my course coordinator mind works on different ways to incorporate more of this type of learning in my courses. The quote by DW: “Teachers have historically been the gatekeepers of authentic knowledge, but now have become more of arbiters of connections” (he said something like that anyway), I thought was interesting. In my advanced courses that contain >50 participants, many of them with lots of knowledge on the subject, I can relate to this metaphor ‘arbiter of connections’. It is simply impossible for me as a teacher to trump such a large critical mass of knowledge...

Now that the course is well under way (and the risk of having to switch groups is fairly low) I think it's time for me to honor my fellow group members and facilitators. What do you think?