Some conclusions drawn while working on topic 3 regarding how to organize active courses. There are differencies between in campus and distance courses, but on the otherhand I think that both types of cources need to be designed in the same way to be relevant in the future.

During our work in the group we agreed on a few viewpoint and aspects woth taking into consideration when running and designing courses.

1. Forming

According to University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) there are some advantages and disadvantages in the way of dividing students into learning groups. There are some major ways of doing this and each of them have different pros and cons.
Random appointment
Easy and quick, but the need of attention if groups have inactive members.
Self-selection
Easy to administre, but teacher have to be aware that some students might not know who to work with and students might have hard to find groups.
Selective appointment
Some say that it can be disadvantageous for less performing students and a risk is the Pygmalion effect (teacher asume all among high performers do their job and miss out if one of them not do what they suppose to do).
Task appointment
Many find this motivating, but unbalanced topic selection with many in some groups and few in others is a risk and there can be a selection bias. Friends tend to sign up for the same topic in the hope of working together.

2. Communicating

Encourage teams to collaborate with online applications outside of the LMS environment. The tools in most LMS platforms are not conducive to effective group work, use Web 2.0 tools outside the platform
 such as chat tools, video conferencing tools, blogs etc. to get the students to interact socially with each others.

Siemens (2002) notes that learner-learner interactions in an e-learning course can be viewed as a four stage continuum:

Communication – People ‘talking,’ discussing
Collaboration – People sharing ideas and working together (occasionally sharing resources) in a loose environment
Cooperation – People doing things together, but each with his or her own purpose
Community – People striving for a common purpose

3. Assessment

In most courses (online and in-campus), most instructors provide a final quiz at the end of their course and a passing score accompanied by a certificate or a grade. This might be a good start but is it enough? Probably not. Assessment works best when it is ongoing, not episodic. This way, you can also show students their progress in the course and what they achieved in each step of the way. Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff (1996, p. 167, ISBN-13: 978-0262082365) for example say that: “In keeping with a learner-centered approach, assessment should be part of the learning-teaching process, embedded in-class activities and in the interactions between learners and between learners and teachers.”

4. Peering

Findings showed that students and professors use both formal and informal environments often, to optimize learning but online course design is usually not designed to consider informal experiences of the students. In the new networked environments, it may be impractical to define what formal or informal learning is but instructors are now more than ever trying to understand the affordances of each to create effective learning designs (Betül C. Czerkawski, 2016).

5. Contributing

Details of the requirements to participate in a course should be described in the course syllabus. The purpose of collaboration and expectations of the learners should be made very clear to all participants and the teacher have to encourage participation, discussions and collaboration and that this is an important part of the contributions in the course. The group task, deadlines and deliverables should be described in detail, giving students the best opportunity to focus on collaborating to share ideas and the workload rather than leaving them to spend a great deal of time trying to understand expectations from the teacher/course.

What are the opportunities and dangers of “going open”?

Opportunities and dangers of “going open”

Although the idea of opness is thriving at the moment, it is important also to look at some challenges that might have effect on the development of open resources. According to (Dr. Jan Hylén, ”Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges”) the challenges can be divided into three main areas.

Lack of awareness of copyright issues

Today it is easy to have access to publishing and production tools, and by licensing access to a digital product rather than a physical object such as a book or print, researchers as well as teachers now have to deal with licensing as never before. Although many academics are willing to share their work, they are often hesitant as how to do this without losing all their rights. Several open content licenses have been developed, like the Creative Commons and the GNU Free Documentation Licence, to accommodate this problem.

Quality assurance

Teachers, students and self-learners looking for resources should not have difficulties finding resources, but still might have problems of judging their quality and relevance.

Some institution-based providers use the reputation of the institution to persuade the user that the materials on the website are of good quality. If not, the prestige of the institution is at risk. Most probably they use internal quality checks before the release of the courses, but these processes are not open in the sense that the user of the resource can follow them.

Another approach is to have the resources reviewed by peers. The peer review process is one of the most used quality assurance processes in academia.

A third quality management approach is not to have a centrally designed process, but rather let individual users decide on whatever ground they like whether a learning resource is of high quality, useful, or good in any other respect. This can be done by letting users rate or comment on the resource or describe how they have used it, or by showing the number of downloads for each resource on the website. This is a kind of low level or bottom-up approach often used on Internet based marketplaces, music sites, etc.

Sustainability of OER initiatives

The fact that so many initiatives for OER, MOOCs and other open initiatives have started has created competition for funding. Although some projects have a strong institutional backing it is most probably start up funding that will cease after a few years. Therefore it is important to seriously consider how the initiatives can be sustained in the long run.