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After reading this week’s article, I believe Online learning offers more benefits to students than offline teaching and gives teachers more opportunities to share more content. First and foremost, online learning allows students to communicate with their professors in ways that are not possible in a traditional classroom (Major, 2015), and students have the freedom to schedule their own time and enjoy the flexibility of learning in a relaxed environment that is often more productive.

In terms of 5 different aspects to compare, from the course term and credit hour, whether it is long term or short term, I think online teaching is more advantageous than traditional teaching because students and teachers can attend classes at home, eliminating the time to travel to and from school. In short-term courses, there are often 3 hours of lectures, and with online learning, students are free to split up the 3 hours of content and don’t have to learn it all at once. In terms of course enrollment, online learning can ignore the number of students, while traditional teaching has to take into account the size of the space and equipment and control the number of students. In terms of course curricular designation, online learning makes it easier to use the system to help the professor group classes. The last point is the course type, online teaching through a variety of software to help students and professors to conduct a variety of meetings, whether it is lectures or seminars can do as well as or better than traditional teaching!

Online learning allows for interactive communication with the instructor through web pages and systems, giving students more freedom to master and become proficient in what they are learning and to choose only what they want to learn, rather than just generalizing from the course syllabus. Because that doesn’t stimulate students’ interest, which is the source of all motivation. During this Covid-19, I participated in a number of different online courses, which provided me with many different experiences, and I prefer online learning to offline learning.

And the history of distributed open learning dates back as far as 1970 (Jordan, 2017) after all this time, it is becoming more and more supported and popular today. The “Open Educational Resources (OERs)” that are now being developed enable all people to share knowledge. According to Mays, OERs are a site of practice, a place where theories of learning, teaching, technology, and social justice speak to each other, informing the development of educational practices and structures. Its five key features are reusability, retention, redistribution, revision, and remixing (Mays, E, 2017).

If I were a teacher, I would teach my students by using distributed open learning and OERs. Distributed open learning gives students more choice and time, and I as a teacher am always aware of the various learning states of my students and get support from distributed learning. I can easily assign weekly learning content in the system, and students can view the learning materials and contact me through web chat at any time. And OERs save my students money so they can focus more on their studies, and they make teaching more resourceful. In addition, I invite my students to participate in the revision of the resources so that they can become better and better, and future students can gain an easier and better understanding through the revisions made by previous students. I like the relaxation of learning, so I hope that in the future if I become a professor, I will let my students enjoy my classes in the way I like best. I believe this will bring better results to the classroom.

 

References

Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017). Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 76-108)

Mays, E. (Ed.). (2017). A guide to making open textbooks with students. Rebus Community.  Chapter 1: Open Pedagogy: https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/

 

Change Descriptions:

I added 5 elements to the blog based on my professor’s suggestion and explained the different benefits they bring to different groups. And after learning the third and fourth topics, I gained new insights about open learning.

So I decided to cut some of the content that I hadn’t learned before and add some new understandings to show what I had learned, including the benefits of OERs, and the benefits for students and teachers.