UCI Open’s Larry Cooperman and Stefano Stefan will be presenting a talk entitled “Open Education Tool Development as Strategy” at this year’s Open Education Global conference in Krakow, Poland, on Tuesday, April 12, 2016. The presentation is part of the conference series “Open Education as Strategy,” and will describe how UCI Open is leveraging the development of three web applications as strategies to overcome three important challenges: content development and management, technology (for both learning and communicating), pedagogy (deciding among learning theories such as constructivism, behaviorism, etc.), and scale (keeping education at a human scale while dealing with thousands of teachers and learners, and the data they generate).
The first of the three applications, OE Web, is what UCI currently uses to host its open content. The second application, UCI Commons, expands upon OE Web by adding the ability for course authors to collaborate on course development and to create multiple versions or “branches” of the same course for different audiences. The third application is completely new and combines the ability to search for content through our library of video lectures with an easy way for students to form peer-led study groups online.
All three applications address our content management needs; the peer-learning application focuses on communications technology that allows students to connect with each other around specific academic topics and pedagogy; and UCI Commons is designed to address the scale issue.
Online education has evolved from its early days of one-way delivery designed to take advantage of zero-cost distribution all the way to the present day in which we combine better instructional technology with the presence of a narrative thread that creates a more effective learning experience for students. Now, with apps such as those being developed at UCI, it is becoming possible to personalize the experience with small online student groups as well as serve increasing numbers of students and instructors.