Reflection on Topic 2: Openness and sharing

To be honest, when I first read the topic headline I started preparing a coffee and got ready to share my life story, but I soon learned that wasn't it...Or was it? Little did i know that openness and sharing was already a big part of my life. From my days in college, living in post-apartheid South Africa, I soon came to realize the inequity and inequality of our country, and something in me stirred. I saw the unfairness, the pain, and the sorrow of generations lost. Lost to poor education and inadequate access. I always felt that one way to repair the past was to open education, and allow everyone to learn, that way everyone could have a fair chance. I stood at the front lines of the students protests begging for free education, got shot at with tear gas and rubber bullets, dodged rocks and bricks from angered learners stripped of their promise of a better future, I experienced a war zone in my own city, students vs police. I experienced that oppression firsthand and to this day it sits with me and drives me. From the old man begging me to come back and teach in the Transkei, to the old man that stood next to me as the police opened fire. I watched as the observer became a participant.

So when I joined up for ONL little did I know that it would be a key that could open so many doors and share my views and hopefully, just hopefully inspire someone somewhere that somehow, somewhen would do something. Little an echo shouted into the abyss waiting for a response.  Listening to Mara Bali, was settling, it was homely. I understood what it was she was trying to get at, maybe it was because we came from the same continent and experienced the same atrocities of learning in our own worlds, but I felt her words, that equity and equality had to play a big role in education in order to fix a world so broken. When I was given the task of co-moderating this topic I felt uneasy because I was not sure of what exactly to do, but I soon learned that was the point, to feel unsure, like a student, this way we had to find our own way of teaching and learning, this was our first step into openness, finding the resources and structure. Something I had experienced in my own teaching was that students enjoyed hearing stories of my own life and career, not just because it wasted time in class, but because it made me human, a life with experience and not just a talking head. So I brought this into my moderating, sharing real-life experiences and correlating them to the task and topic. 

In doing so we realized there were some major differences in our group, mostly one major difference, at which I was the center, private VS public. I was at a private institution and everyone else was at a public institution, this brought up a lot of notable differences, which had benefits and obstacles, each with their own. Public institutions were more focused on prestige and qualification within academia, whereas private was more focused on production and cost. Understandable for each sector. Public was constantly open to critique and leveraged quality over quantity, whereas in private we are more focused on producing results that can go straight into respective industries. Private education is also wrapped up in policy and intellectual property laws, anything shared can only be shared within the realm of the private institution itself, which is understandable considering that the private sector is a lot more competitive in terms of content and production, so it would be obvious that their content would be more private than that of a public institution which was funded by the state, especially in those countries with free education. In the private sector, you need to be the best and have your own take in order to attract new students, whereas public institutions already have their own recognition available. But this also meant that within private a lot more goes under the radar as it is never completely moderated, even external moderators are usually brought in from different brands under the same umbrella, this meant that a lot of irregularities ensued which are usually fixed up only when noted. Yet, even though, this also allows certain freedom for the teacher to express and compose their curriculum without the fear of agonizing critique, with that being said it also means that there is a lot more reliance on the teacher to actually deliver, which isn't always the case. 

It entirely relies on the educator themself to employ these techniques and practices, within private we are confined by price, if it costs it won't fly, so when it comes to OERs and OEPs, in private they are fully welcomed IF being included in the content at no additional cost, but not if it is the content itself being opened, this would be a breach of I.P. policy.  What i noticed when everyone did their investigation into their own institutions was that the major obstacles were just permission and the actual process of creating the OER, public institutions are more likely to be open due to their prestige, being open only adds to this, whereas in private, if one were to be open, they would have to find a way around the IP policies, this resulted in educators creating their own content that was within in the context of the subject, but not the subject itself., IE I can make an open YouTube channel that talks about acting as a tool of self-improvement, but I can not talk about acting for a camera specifically as that is my subject content, I can go on to even include my created content within the study guide and curriculum, as long as my open content is only used as additional information and not the curriculum itself. At first, I saw this as a great obstacle and hindrance, but the more I explored these ideas the more another idea started to formulate: What if this was a good thing? If I am a professional in my field, then why should I not be producing my own content like all those videos and articles I see and use in my teaching already, what if instead of some random American talking about using their voice with different accents, it was me giving an exercise that I use to strengthen and practice my own voice and accents? What if private was not trying to stifle my own progress, but rather forcing me into a position of creating my own? M<aybe this was not the intention, but it was the outcome. Whether it was expected or not is not on me. All I know is that to be open, on a scale that influences learners, I need to up my game, I need to create content that is on par with those whose pages and videos I share. And this is what I realized about being in private, we don't have the institution to rely on, we have to create our own way and prove ourselves.