OPEN Courseware

After teaching in classrooms ranging from community colleges to for-profit institutions, I can identify a common thread that reaches all sectors of higher education: There are many learning needs and challenges. As we face a world that is becoming smaller through globalization, emerging socioeconomic needs come to the gates of the Ivory Tower. Challenges with disruptive students and students perusing Facebook in class on the U’s FREE wireless internet are no longer the ‘superstar’ topics of conversation among faculty. Rather, the face of higher education is changing, and rapidly.

With the boom of for-profit college institutions over the past 10 years, the world of higher education faced new challenges and questioned the sectors quality of education, instructors, and curriculum. While I believe there are problems needing to be addressed in the for-profit and land grant or private university sectors, significant changes have been made internally and politically that brought sweeping change to the face of for-profit education. Gainful Employment requires for-profit career education based programs to prove they are preparing their students for ‘gainful employment’ in a recognized and employable career occupation. Schools who fail to meet these regulations risk losing access to federal student aid.

In addition to the Gainful Employment legislation that the Obama Administration supports, a portion of students are suing the institutions for falsely misleading them about the validity of the program, accreditation validity, and deceptive admissions processes. While for-profit institutions are under the lens among students and legislators, a different area of university based learning has taken over the university coffee shop roundtable: Open Courseware.

The basis of an ‘open courseware’ platform is to offer an individual or general community access to curricular university classes where faculty and instructors publish entire or parts of their curriculum. One could say the moral purpose of open courseware is to give free educational access of materials to any individual who seeks or has a desire to learn.  Essentially, an individual not enrolled in a post-secondary institution gains access to knowledge and resources which essentially could give individuals, or even entire communities, the ability to seek education and higher learning enfranchasied from socioeconomic restrictions. Ivy League schools, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare, Yale’s Open Yale Courses, Harvard’s Extension School Open Learning Initiative historically have spurred the open courseware moral purpose initiative among higher education. Of course, we cannot leave out the hallmark of consortium open courseware technology, Apple’s iTunes U.

As an educator, I can acknowledge arguments that the open courseware philosophy contributes to the idea that institutionally, higher education no longer is the sole distribution of knowledge and thereby, becoming an alternative to seeking such knowledge. In layman’s terms, one could humorously say, the Ivory Tower is becoming increasingly less important in society and therefore so are our jobs. 🙂 Well, hindsight is always 20/20. However, we as the ‘Ivory Tower’ are also addressing a very important civic need, giving access to education for those who have none. Common knowledge will historically show countries with solid educational roots generally have citizens who are considered more tolerant, participate in civic engagement, and maintain higher living standards in comparison to countries with a weak or nominal education level. In the United States, we have people who, depending on their socioeconomic status may never have the opportunity to attend a university or pursue higher education. If we do not open a door or even attempt to reculture the ‘gatekeeper’ perspective within higher education, I feel the long-term effects on our culture would be detrimental.

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Service-Learning Evaluation

Service-learning is a teaching methodology used to aid in student understanding of the learning objectives of a given course. The spirit of service-learning could be described as learning by doing through an act of giving time and talent. We as educators want students to see the value of learning by doing and engage beyond the walls of a classroom.

While most educators find the service activity a natural fit to teaching and learning, evaluation of the learning is opaque. Developing evaluation rubrics for service-learning projects is not as challenging as one may perceive. The main emphasis we must maintain is to correlate the learning objectives in the course to the rubric directly. This means that students should be developing understanding and demonstrating the learning objectives in a given course throughout the service-learning project. If this continuum is not maintained, we as educators run the risk of requiring our students to volunteer, at best.

When the learning objectives of the course have been identified, one can now start to develop an evaluation rubric of the service-learning project. While there are many steps in developing a service-learning project, the purpose of this blog entry, specifically, is to identify the characteristics of an effective evaluation. Once one has identified the learning objectives, they must pinpoint the goals of the service-learning project. What are you expecting students to accomplish? What should students be able to demonstrate understanding of as a result of the service-learning project? What traits should students identify/demonstrate as a result of the project? You get the idea.

An effective evaluation is always clear to students up front. Prior to beginning a project, students rely upon knowing what they can expect to experience and how they will be evaluated. While educators should not be evaluating students on whether they “liked” or “disliked” a service-learning experience, we can evaluate students on the following:

Accurate: Are students able to present accurate and reliable EVIDENCE from their service-learning experience? Meaning, can students put theory into practice? Is this presented in the reflection or assignment?

Pertinent: Does the student actually answer the evaluation question clearly and directly? Or, are they giving an ambiguous statement that frees them from giving a direct response?

Objective: This is where the grey area is. We want students to be able to give us feedback, but not base their analysis with statements that are only laden with emotion. Students should be objective with their analysis of the experience. Meaning, students should faithfully represent their experience in relation to the course versus inserting their own opinions (emotionally based) as evidence.

Well organized and readable: Is the evaluation easy to understand? Is the assignment free of jargon? Is the reflection clear?

Logical: Does the student show RELATIONSHIP or CONNECTION with the learning objectives in the class to the service-learning experience? An important note for us as educators is to remember to meet the student at their critical thinking level. This means that we should be focusing on asking ourselves how the questions are posed to students. In order for students to present logical responses that are based in critical thinking, versus their feelings about the experience, they must clearly be presented questions with distinction and precise language.

Useful: Does the student provide useful information for the reader? Is this information based on observation and application? Would the information be helpful for improvement or demonstrate that the student identifies a need within the community the service-learning project took place?

Fundamentally, one wants to remember that the purpose of a service-learning experience is to allow students to learn by giving back to their community. The primary importance should not be placed in the evaluation metric but on developing an enriching experience for both students and community.

To review the presentation on service-learning evaluation in its entirety, please visit the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse Website: http://servicelearning.org/webinars/service-learning-evaluation

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