Life Long Learning: Open Courseware Rules!

Inspired by the month September and the beginning of an academic year, I decided to write about learning, a subject that has always been important to me and kept me interested. Don’t know how others experience it, but about a year after I graduated from college, I noticed I was missing something. As I’d come to realize some time later, learning was that something I was missing. Learning in a broader sense of the word, like acquiring new knowledge and integrating it with the knowledge you already possess.

The following seems like a plausible explanation of the reason I missed it. If I’d describe myself in terms of developmental psychology I studied at school, from the moment my leading activity changed from play to learning (at about age 6 or 7), I’ve been learning stuff all the time and most of the time quite intensively. From foreign languages to different college subjects – I seemed good at learning things. What I also came to realize later on is that acquiring new knowledge was something I found truly joyful. As the story goes, I didn’t have to miss learning for too long, as I enrolled in yet another college study and enjoyed it to the fullest – for another 4 years, to be exact. 4 years filled with courses, exams, papers and doing research. I couldn’t have been happier!

In a later stadium, when you leave school and start working, you generally continue acquiring new knowledge in a lot of ways, though of a more practical and specialistic nature. But most of all, these are skills you acquire. You learn putting things that you learned at school into practice – to a bigger or lesser extent of coincidence with what your vocational training prepared you for – and that is exactly what getting the so-called experience is all about. At a certain point of your professional development you are then reaching a stabilization stadium, when the acquired skills become more or less automatic. There are then two scenarios possible: either you are enjoying this relatively stable and quiet period and then gradually heading to seniority, or you are eventually feeling the lack of growth and development and become unhappy and ‘bored out’. I’d like to avoid generalizing too much, as this is very individual to everyone, but just sketching a picture to get the idea.

 

This feeling of lack of development and professional growth is exactly the opposite of what you feel when learning new things. At least this definitely applies to me. And learning new things in our digital era has never been easier and more accessible. Given you are a self-motivated, so-called autotelic individual and are capable of motivating yourself to learn something new even if it’s not particularly necessary, you will be rewarded if you have a look at the limitless source of information and knowledge that Internet has become.

Anyway, if you are as knowledge-savvy as me, you’ll be elated to find out how many wonderful sources there are on the web to learn new stuff. You should also be critical of the quality, of course, but if we are talking about the content made accessible to the general public under open licenses by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford or Berkeley, then we are talking high-end educational materials here. Welcome to the age of MOOCs, massive open online courses, aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web, as they are hotter than hot!

When I learned about open courseware like a year ago, I was ecstatic. Don’t I have to pay to enroll in one of those (under)graduate courses by MIT that I can just follow online? I mean I even wasn’t allowed to follow a minor in Microeconomics during my communication studies bachelor, as I had to be a member of the economics faculty for that. What a shame, which especially felt stupid, as I had already purchased an expensive textbook before I found out! But now I’m following the Microeconomics classes by the most celebrated professors of a leading university in the States that I would otherwise hardly have access to just a couple of years back! And what’s more – lucky me – they happen to recommend that same textbook to the course J. I’m at topic 3 of unit 1 after just 2 weeks and counting… Gee, it’s a lot of homework reading sometimes, but I’m determined to finish by the end of November.

As far as the open courseware is concerned, it seems to be a topic of hot discussions in the world of education. And as education is something near and dear to me because of my degree in ELT, I did a little research into the open courseware market. The open educational resources come in all possible forms, varying in subjects offered, the degree of interaction and feedback (e.g. peer-review or group collaboration), fixed/free starting course dates, grading and possibilities of certification. They all are forms of e-learning, or education using new technologies, primarily complex software platforms, including access to videos of the lectures, handouts, (interactive) group assignment, exams etc. Udacity (a for-profit MOOC with the roots at Stanford university), Coursera (offering a range of university course with fixed starting dates), MITOpenCourseWare (with over 2080 courses available online), edX (a non-profit cooperation of MIT and Harvard with a goal to conduct research into learning), iTunesU (perfectly compatible with the Apple’s ITunes Store and other Apple’s products) are just a few most popular to name here. There are also MOOCs in other language than English and the number of countries and educational establishments joining in is constantly growing.

As of 2012, there is talk of a hype around the growing popularity of MOOCs. Time magazine even stated that free MOOCs open the door to the 'Ivy League for the Masses’, which cannot but make universities worry. Moreover, the university’s are also worried about tuitions. What if this great initiative is going to work against them with the student numbers decreasing? At the moment the tendency is to charge for the actual certification, but the discussion is still going on as to the financial part of the matter, with most of the free educational resources currently financed with donations.

So no matter what your motivation is: becoming more effective in the work you do (and maybe even getting paid more eventually), compensating for a lack of degree or simply because learning new things is fun, with a little perseverance, discipline combined with some smart time management – especially if done next to a (fulltime) job – knowledge of greatest quality is out there, easily accessible, interactive and free, just reach out and you’ll get it. Also hop on now and be on time before the providers of this great knowledge come up with some smart idea to still charge you for the resources provided.

Do you have experience with learning after graduation or leaning next to a job? Do tell us about it! And have a lot of fun learning!