Abstract:

Our paper offers an insight on the reflection we are currently making in the project team of OpenCourseWare (OCW) KU Leuven. In 2012 KU Leuven launched its website (http://ocw.kuleuven.be) with the purpose to open up its education in the form of OCW. We are running an educational project to outline the implementation of OCW in KU Leuven’s education. To this end five courses, currently taught at university as regular courses, were chosen as pilots and are being converted to fully functional Open Courses. In our view, not only the content (presented to its users under the form of weblectures, texts, auto-corrective exercises, self-tests, etc...) but also the learning process has to be represented in an Open Course. Therefore we developed the concept of Study Guides aiming at educating students to become empowered, autonomous and self-regulated learners. Another important form of study support is the concept of peer-to-peer interactions: in the near future we will be offering the possibility to students to interact with one another in online forums.

Creating the aforementioned Study Guides was primarily very obvious for us since it is a direct consequence of our current view on learning: learning as a social and constructivist process, the learning theory that considers learners as active constructors of knowledge and insights, while interacting with their environment. The result of a learning process is then a connection between formerly acquired knowledge and newly acquired knowledge. However, if we will rely on peers too to constitute the learning process in an Open Course, we might be evolving more towards what Stephen Downes calls a connectivist view on learning. In the latter view, the process of knowledge building is seen to as an active and constructive process, but where according to the constructivists this is an internal process, connectivists believe that this construction happens in a network.

Keywords:

OpenCourseWare, Open Eduction, Student support, Learning paradigm, KU Leuven.