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- Offers 10,000 private courses run by public and private institutes of higher learning.
- Takes on a student-centred approach while enabling educators with its social elements
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| OpenLearning founder and chief executive officerr Adam Brimo |
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| Photo: Chong Jinn Xiung |
“Education today is probably at the stage
that the print industry was in during the late 1990s, slowly accepting
and experimenting with the new possibilities offered by the Internet,”
he says.
That’s where online learning platform
OpenLearning, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform, hopes to
ease the process of online learning for students and teachers in
institutes of higher learning.
Headquartered in Sydney, Australia,
OpenLearning’s online platform was first deployed in 2012 to facilitate a
blended learning course, that combined online learning with traditional
classroom lessons at the University of New South Wales (UNSW).
In 2014, OpenLearning spread its wings to
Malaysia and became part of the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education’s
Education Blueprint for 2015-2025 acting as the MOOC platform for 20
public universities in the country, initiating 60 blended courses to
over 100,000 students.
The truth is that the economy is growing
faster than the higher education sector is able to produce students to
fuel the knowledge economy. However, building new universities is
expensive and finding qualified academics is a challenge.
“The number of students entering tertiary
education is expected to increase significantly within the next decade
as it is estimated by there will be 2.5 million students entering public
and private universities in Malaysia,” Brimo says, citing estimates in
the Malaysian Education Blueprint .
To date, OpenLearning has over 3,000
public courses that anyone can set up and join. They also have 10,000
private courses run by public and private institutes of higher learning.
Even the courses are shared across all
universities so students from other universities are able to participate
with peers from across the country...
Enabling educators
“In traditional learning, students lack
empowerment because the power is in the hands of the teacher and
information is dispensed. In contrast, personalised learning has a more
experimental flow where students can experience, discover and express
themselves.”
Brimo is of the opinion that teachers are
there to support the learning process rather than take control of it.
They should guide a student’s discovery and curiosity by utilising
engaging content through videos and easy-to-digest lessons complemented
by interactive activities that encourage participation.
At the same time, the platform is also out
to assist teachers in facilitating classes of any size be it 10, 50 or
even over a hundred students.
Much of what makes a MOOC course great has
to do with the course design and for that OpenLearning has its own team
of dedicated designers that look at how to make offline classroom
material suited for online learning.
Source: Digital News Asia
