Presentation by Alec Couros

This past Thursday, Dr. Alec Couros put on a presentation through Zoom Video to our Internet for Educators class. I couldn't believe how engaged I was considering it as 2 hour slide-show presented over a laptop screen! The insight Dr. Couros brings forth towards educational tech is outstanding. The presentation was full of interesting perspectives that were mostly new to me, but there were two that stood out above the rest. The first was the power of the internet to allow students fingertip access to pretty much the entire data base of human knowledge and secondly, the open-learning style that accompanies it.

The implications to education in terms of ease for student access to information seems its changing the profession. I can't imagine teachers really being seen as the all encompassing knowledge keepers anymore especially when YouTube can pretty much teach a person anything they want to know. We need to adapt to this changing landscape.

This leads to the other point Dr. Couros brought up which is the concept of open-learning. Open-learning is a student centered approach to education where the students interests guide their own education. I could see myself using this in the class-room. The structure is a little looser than the traditional education system but I can imagine student engagement to be much higher. The main challenges I see that would arise though, especially at the senior years level, would be connection to curriculum and assessment. It would be very difficult to ensure that all students are meeting the curricular SLO's when student skills and interests could vary so widely! Not to mention trying to mark 100 assignments that are all different. I imagine the type of assigned work would have to be more project based as well, which in themselves take a lot longer to mark but if the students would benefit from them. I guess it's worth it.