Teacher as entrepreneur

CC BY-NC Some rights reserved by J+B=Us

While most of the xMOOC interest is focused around the big league players like MIT, Stanford, Harvard and friends, another looser model is flourishing. Udemy started in 2010 and today offers around 5000 courses from a very wide range of teachers and enthusiasts. The difference here is that whereas the xMOOC players (edX, Coursera, Udacity) offer university approved courses, Udemy allows anyone to upload their own course and offer it on their virtual  marketplace. Some courses are free but many have a fee, though generally very low. It's up to the course creator to set the price and size of the course.

Udemy have now launched a new course publishing platform as described in an article in TechCrunch, Udemy Rolls Out New Publishing Platform To Help Teachers Create Quality Online Courses, This provides you with a step-by-step guide and read-to-use templates that enable you to design and launch your own course site. You decide whether your course is going to be free or fee-paying, how open it is, what language it uses and other parameters. Then you are guided through curriculum design and how to add your content (text, photos, diagrams, videos etc). Once the course is ready you can then add it to Udemy's catalogue and start marketing it. Udemy even offer its teachers a  closed Facebook group, The Udemy Faculty Lounge, for discussions and help. The video below gives a short introduction to how the publishing platform works.




The fee-paying aspect makes distinguishes Udemy from the major xMOOC players but it's a voluntary issue and teachers decide themselves what price to set, if any. However if your course attracts thousands of learners, that modest fee can amount to a nice little earner. In an interview with Udemy co-founder Eren Bali, Q&A: Every Expert Will Teach Online In 10 Years:

"... we believe strongly in a sustainable model in which instructors are rewarded and able to earn an income from the amazingly in-depth courses & learning content they deliver. Our top 10 instructors earned over $1.6 million in their first 12 months on Udemy and I hope we’ll go on to enable many more instructors to earn a living teaching on Udemy."

This enables the individual teacher or enthusiast to offer a course that is not part of an institutional portfolio and the opportunity to earn some money from it. It could also enable smaller institutions to offer massive courses for small fees and still earn enough to cover costs to some extent. This is not going to revolutionize learning or threaten the formal system but it offers another pathway to learning and widens the scope of informal learning.

Learning as a process

  by  myDefinition

In gaming you generally get rewards for taking small steps forward. Rewards come thick and fast when you're on the lowest levels (I have extensive experience in that area) and those small symbols of encouragement help you to push on towards the serious levels of the game. If you make a mistake your character automatically gets a new life and you just keep trying till you succeed. Regular rewards and the ability to practice over and over again until you get it right mean that most players will get many hours of pleasure out of the game and will be highly motivated to buy the follow-up game that will undoubtedly appear within a year.

This is a subject discussed in a new article by Justin Marquis, Teaching Students to Fail Their Way to Success. In education the emphasis is more on the end result (exam, test, assessment) than the process and the stakes are high. A failure doesn't automatically give you a new life and can often lead to the pupil/student giving up the course completely.

"With a focus on testing, competencies, and teacher accountability in education, the focus is taken off of playing the game (learning) and put on finishing it (outcomes). While standards, standardized tests, or marketable skills (in higher education), are part of our educational reality, they do not need to be the focus of your teaching. Whenever possible, given the constraints of a schedule, give students the opportunity to work at their own pace towards clear learning objectives."

Failure is part of the learning process; you'll never learn to skate without falling over a lot. In gaming failure is treated as a natural element and each failure can lead to success next time. That element keeps us involved and small "failures" are motivators to try again rather than demotivators. The key in education is to focus on the process of learning rather than the result of it.

"We live in a connected world where "knowing" something is much less important than knowing how to find information and apply it. Part of that process is understanding how to respond to failure when things don’t work out. Adjusting your instructional objectives to help students understand that learning is a process of which failure is a key ingredient will help them to be successful when there are no more tests to take and failure is not an option."

From flipping to empowerment

CC BY Some rights reserved by MillionaireAt19

The flipped classroom has been one of the main educational trends of the past year or so. The idea is to move the input sessions to net-based videos that can be watched at home and spend class time on discussion, practice and feedback. Teachers can either record their lectures and demonstrations or use other teacher's material that is available as open educational resources. It means that class time is used for real contact between students and teacher and not for one-way communication.

However an excellent article by Shelley Wright, The Flip: End of a Love Affair, takes the flipped classroom several steps further. Just flipping the classroom is only the beginning of a process. It's still a traditional model where the lecture still dominates even if there's more flexibility. Shelley wanted to teach the students to learn for themselves and noticed that as they became more confident they didn't need to be given videos to watch at home, they started finding material for themselves. The flipped classroom evaporated and became the empowered classroom.

"As this new way of learning played out over time, my students found they didn’t need me to locate or create videos for them. Instead, they learned how to learn, and they were able to find their own resources. For me, this was a much more important skill than following my directions or using the resources I told them to use. As this shift occurred, the flip simply disappeared from our classroom. It took almost a year for me to notice it was gone. Instead, our classroom had become a place where students discovered and shared their own resources, while engaging in projects with each other. There was no need for me to assign video homework or create portable lectures. It all happened during class."

The students had assignments to carry out but were empowered to choose the route and the tools for themselves with the teacher as a constant facilitator and advisor. Interestingly they were also enthusiastic to combine digital with traditional media. Some used textbooks, others digital resources. Some designed web resources whereas others built physical models in the classroom. Most combined all forms. We learn in different ways at different times and using different media. Digital and analogue thrive together and so it must be. Using technology in education is not about replacing; it's about adding new dimensions, new methods and new combinations. So the flipped classroom eventually evaporates and you have empowered students who have learnt how to learn. Surely that is the objective of all education.

Uncollege

Getting a degree used to be a passport to a well-paid job but not any more. When well over half of all school leavers go to university a college degree is anything but exclusive. Furthermore students all over the world are putting themselves in serious debt to pay for this not so exclusive commodity. Employers are less and less impressed by degrees and increasingly interested in soft skills like creativity, teamwork, initiative and grit (as mentioned in my last post). Many students do not feel that traditional educational institutions foster these soft skills and prefer to drop out and go their own way.

One such student is Dale Stephens, featured in an article in the Dutch web magazine SURF (September 2012). He represents the concept of uncollege, a variant on the unschooling model, where you take charge of your own learning and development but in collaboration with peers both in your neighbourhood but mostly on the net. He has founded the site Uncollege which features advice on alternative educational paths, networking skills, reading lists and the chance to join the Uncollege Hackademic Camp in January 2013.

Stephens isn't against universities and schools and isn't planning a revolution. He simply wants to show that there are other roads to a fulfilling career than via your nearest university. Those who don't fit into the often narrow path of higher education need relevant new alternatives. Maybe universities can reinvent themselves to create learning environments more tuned to fostering creativity and entrepreneurship.

"Colleges should provide access to opportunities. My ideal college looks like a gym – it’s not something you drop out of, but rather a physical space you drop into. you go there when you want to learn something, you can take out a subscription to use a laboratory, you can meet your professor, who acts as a life coach and points you in the right direction. ideally, universities should provide directories of people with similar interests, they should focus on forming communities of students around topics. in short: they should serve the student as a user."

Here's a TEDx presentation by Stephens from last year.

When the going gets tough

  by  Dvortygirl

Although I firmly believe that learning can be fun and that elements such as gaming and collaboration are an integral part of 21st century education there is still a lot of hard grind involved in mastering new knowledge and skills. No matter how many interactive tools we use and how much innovative pedagogy we apply you're still going to need to sit for endless hours practising and perfecting. Learning a language, for example, needs hundreds of hours of hard graft to get those words. phrases, sounds and patterns into your head until they become instinctive. Same goes for music, maths, physics, chemistry and pretty well every subject you can name. There are no easy short-cuts to mastery and although there will be many moments of pleasure and discovery there'll still be months and maybe years of hard grind. New technologies can stimulate us to learn and can facilitate more effective learning but the hard work still remains.

In education we love to measure and assess skills but we focus on the skills that are easiest to measure (fact-based memory checks, ability to write in a given framework) and leave many non-cognitive skills untouched. An article in Mind/Shift, How Important is Grit in Student Achievement?, raises one such skill, namely grit. The article focuses on research by Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania into how to assess grit which she defines as “sticking with things over the very long term until you master them.” Grit is that determination to keep battling even when you don't fully understand or see where the battle is leading you. It's a quality that some have and some lack and is not always related to intellectual ability. Many highly intelligent people lack this determination whilst many less gifted individuals succeed because they work very hard and never give up.

"But intelligence leaves a lot unexplained. There are smart people who aren’t high achievers, and there are people who achieve a lot without having the highest test scores. In one study, Duckworth found that smarter students actually had less grit than their peers who scored lower on an intelligence test. This finding suggests that, among the study participants — all students at an Ivy League school — people who are not as bright as their peers “compensate by working harder and with more determination.” And their effort pays off: The grittiest students — not the smartest ones — had the highest GPAs."

Not all people have this quality and even those who do exhibit it in different settings. Someone can show incredible dedication and perseverance in one activity but can give up easily in another. A classic example of this are those who show total commitment to their sporting ambitions but the complete opposite attitude to academic activities. The challenge is to find out how to inspire grit in education. As Duckworth puts it in the article:

“Which experiences do we give kids to get them in the direction of more grit and not less?”

Publish your own interactive e-book

Publishing has never been easier. Instead of being tied to pre-set textbooks many teachers are writing the course literature themselves and then publishing it for free and in many cases making it available for reuse, adaptation or translation. Last weekend (28 - 30 September) there was the much-publicized online collaboration project between a group of Finnish teachers to write a new school mathematics text book (see article in Edudemic: Finnish Teachers Are Writing An Entire Math Textbook This Weekend). This type of production highlights the power of social media in education where virtual teams of teachers and students can produce a new book without needing to meet in person. Of course they must have had plenty of material and ideas up their sleeves but the process must have been inspiring. More will undoubtedly follow.

The Finnish group wrote their e-book using open source software that requires programming skills but for less technically interested teachers there are plenty of simple tools available. Apple's free iBook authoring tool is one such tool and I'd like to recommend an excellent step by step guide to writing an interactive e-book by Shawn Ozbun, Create an interactive eBook for the iPad using iBook Author: THE COMPLETE GUIDE. The authoring tool is pretty locked into Apple's walled garden of course but it is remarkably easy to produce very attractive professional ebooks by following the templates and pulling in the resources you wish to use (assuming of course you have the rights to use them). have a look at the introduction film below and then go to the full guide.

Another authoring tool that works on all platforms is Widbook. More basic than iBooks but highly practical. All you need to do is write the book!

Uncomfortable truths

  by  jepoirrier

I've just read an article about how often behavioural research is disregarded because it clashes with ingrained traditions and beliefs. The article is in Swedish (Det är dags att tänka på hjärnan - Dagens Nyheter) but you can always try it via Google Translate. It features a researcher called Katarina Gospic and she lists examples of where brain research has produced uncomfortable truths that we prefer not to deal with.

One such uncomfortable truth is the fact that open-plan offices do not make people more creative. Research clearly shows that people do not work effectively in such environments since we need to use the most creative part of our brains to block out the surrounding noise and distractions. But, despite all research results, the open-plan office still dominates, in many cases with ever-shrinking square metres for each employee. Basically, the financial incentives to maximise the use of office space outweighs the research results.

Gospic also points to research showing that large financial bonuses have virtually no motivational effect on people who already earn high salaries. Bonuses can, however, have a postive effect on low wage earners. Once again these results have had little or no effect on business practice. Money talks.

It seems that although we like to believe that we rationally base our decisions on the latest research, if that research clashes with tradition or financial expediency then we conveniently disregard it. There is plenty of research into how learning is a social process, that we learn best in practical and real-life situations and that few people learn simply by listening and memorizing. However this clashes with fundamental beliefs in education (ie schools as institutions, lecturing, classrooms, age-group segregation etc) that are not only deeply ingrained in society but also are very cost-effective structures for mass-education. Changing the system may cost a lot of money and involve a major rethink of many of the central structures in society. Maybe best to simply keep Pandora's box firmly shut.

Multitasking in class

  by  catspyjamasnz

An article in Faculty Focus caught my attention a couple of days ago, Students Think They Can Multitask. Here’s Proof They Can’t. I find the whole multitasking concept as tiresome as digital natives and dividing up humanity in tidy generations (X, Y, Z whatever) but this article raises more questions than it answers. It refers to several academic studies showing how students who multitask
retained less from a lecture than those who had no distractions.

"With easy access to all sorts of technology, students multitask. So do lots of us for that matter. But students are way too convinced that multitasking is a great way to work. They think they can do two or three tasks simultaneously and not compromise the quality of what they produce. Research says that about 5% of us multitask effectively. Proof of the negative effects of multitasking in learning environments is now coming from a variety of studies."

While I agree that it's good to burst the bubble that people can work effectively whilst multitasking it's interesting that nearly all the studies look at multitasking during lectures. Why do people multitask during a lecture? Since it's mostly one-way communication students often switch off and are easily distracted. Whether they get distracted by checking Facebook, web sites, games etc or resort to analogue distractions such as doodling, writing letters, reading the paper or solving a crossword makes no difference. This isn't a new phenomenon at all but computers and mobiles just offer more enticing distractions.

Any situation where students or colleagues are forced to sit passively listening for long periods will cause many to switch off. If you're not actively involved in the session you will check your messages and news and if you don't have a computer handy you will start to daydream or plan a future event. This has nothing to do with multitasking. I'd like to see studies that reveal how little multitasking takes place when students are fully involved in a learning situation and are taking responsibility for their learning.

People don't multitask simply because the distractions are available. They multitask when the current activity is not sufficiently interesting and they have no active role to play.

Remote control

There have always been people who offer to write your essays or assignments for you at a price. It's inevitable that such services will now thrive on line and it's no surprise to read in Inside Higher Ed this week an article called Paying for an A. It highlights web services like We take your classes that offer to do your online courses for you while you concentrate on more interesting activities.

In the past such services offered to write a single assignment for you whereas now they can take the whole course. It's not cheap and is probably not an option for the vast majority of students but with so many online courses available today there must be plenty where identity checks are less stringent than they should be. Instead of being outraged and deciding that online education is wide open for cheats we should maybe look a little deeper at this type of scam and what it really says about education.

If you can let someone else do the course for you then the provider has definitely got serious quality issues to deal with. The article in Inside Higher Ed gives examples of colleges who have quite rigorous security checks on online students to ensure that the right person is answering the questions. Random questions, video sessions, bank-style personal security log-ins and biometrics may all feature in online learning before long. However we also have to look at the way many online courses are designed. Courses that are based on the transfer of information and are heavily content-based tend to have examination forms that lend themselves to cheating. The greater the interaction between teacher and student and between students the harder it gets to cheat like this. According to Kyle Johnson, an independent higher ed consultant:

“What kind of experience are we providing for students if someone is able to take an entire class for a student and we never figure it out from the interaction? At a pedagogical level, that’s my concern. Are we really just dumping information at them so someone can come in and take a couple of quizzes and they’re done?”

Two conclusions from this case then. We need to move from linear, content-based courses to collaborative, task-based courses where assessment comes from successful completion of projects and where networking and dialogue make cheating extremely difficult. We also need to find better ways of checking identity online and maybe more complex log-ins as described in the article may be part of the solution.

Gonna sit right down and write myself a letter

We probably write more today than ever before but one of the problems of today's non-stop flow of communication is that it tends to be immediate, spontaneous and transitory. There may be many great thoughts in there but they are drowned in a sea of trivia. One art that seems to have all but died is that of letter-writing. The letters of great writers, politicians and thinkers are still published and studied as literary works but this element will be missing when future generations study our times. Who will publish an author's collected tweets or selected Facebook updates? The question of how to store such communication for the future has not been resolved.

I was intrigued therefore to read an article in Edudemic: Lettrs Encourages Thoughtful Digital Writing And A Slower Communications Movement. A new service called lettrs enables you to start storing and writing real letters again. As you can see in the film below, the aim of lettrs is to encourage more lengthy and meaningful writing and combining the analogue world of the letter with the benefits of digital storage and flexibility. One function is the ability to scan and upload your favourite letters from the past that may be stored in a shoebox or drawer at home. These can be uploaded to your virtual shoebox on lettrs where they can be stored in privacy or you can share them with friends or even make them publically available on your virtual fridge.

There is already a large number of public letters out there and you can reply to them and start a discussion or simply use them as models for your own letters. Some people have shared letters from family members that go back over 100 years and can be fascinating reading. Another function is the ability to write letters to loved ones that are stored and delivered at a future date, even in years from now. This all assumes of course that lettrs is a service that will survive in the long term and that is probably the weakness in the concept since we have seen many social media services disappear overnight in the last few years.

The Edudemic article focuses on how schools can use lettrs to revive the art of letter-writing in a meaningful way. Schools all over the world are invited to participate in the revival of this important but threatened art.

"The pilot was very well received by the school but unusually popular with the students who were exposed to the timeless need and craft of letter writing, even in their digitally enabled world. A larger program is being launched at the school with a “letters to veterans” campaign this Fall.

lettrs also plans a larger campaign to “save letters” at schools across the country as part of its slower communications movement, encouraging kids to think about what they write, and take the time to impact the life of another person through the power, craft, and timeless tradition of a letter.

People from 60 different countries have signed up on lettrs to bring letters back, just a little differently. Interested schools can contact info@lettrs.com to discuss a correspondence campaign for students grades 6-12."

Don't shoot the piano-player

  by  shakakahnevan

There's a steady stream of headlines about cheating in education. It's mostly cases of plagiarism and an underlying tone in many of the reports is that this is rising due to the use of computers in schools and universities. We bemoan today's cut-and-paste culture and many are increasingly sceptical of online examination. It's easy to blame technology for the increase in plagiarism but you seldom read about the technology that detects the cheaters. Is plagiarism really on the rise or are we getting better at discovering it?

Back in the good old days when I went to university I suspect that cheating was just as frequent, if not more so. Today a teacher can use anti-plagiarism software to check a student essay but in the past the teacher had to be very sharp to detect any signs of cheating. A clever student could certainly cut and paste from old essays and more obscure journal articles and run very little risk of being detected.

We regularly read about politicians, business people, celebrities and sports stars who cheat and cut corners to win the big deals and honours. Therefore the idea that education would be any different is absurd. If there are material rewards at stake then some people will be tempted to cheat. The greater the rewards the greater the temptation. It's not the net that causes people to cheat, we've been good at that for centuries.

Enter the LOOC

  by  n0nick

The various forms of more or less free and open education that are uncomforatbly arranged under the term MOOC are constantly evolving and twisting into new forms. I have previously noted the need to adopt a new terminology for the different educational models that are emerging since the term MOOC does not fit all of them. In the past couple of weeks a few new interesting developments have taken place adding new flavours to the mix.

First, Lisa M. Lane has announced that she no longer wishes her open courses to be considered as MOOCs since the term has becomne so misused and misunderstood - see her blog post You Say MOOC, We Don’t (Anymore). Her open online class, Program for online teaching, is a course with a set syllabus and schedule and not an arena for experienced MOOCers or researchers interested in the MOOC phenomenon. It's not even massive and participation is limited.

"We are just an online class. If you’d like to join us, read the textbook, follow the syllabus, and post accordingly, you are heartily welcome. If you want to use us as a venue for your creative development as a networked individual and eschew the class structure and intention, I’d prefer you not join us in the class and I’ll happily interact with you in my networks (because I am a networked individual also and I love your ideas)."

Another development in a similar vein is reported by Inside Higher Ed, MOOCs' Little Brother. The University of Maine at Presque Isle have launched an interesting new twist to the MOOC formula in the shape of a LOOC (Little Open Online Course). The concept is called the UMPI OpenU Project and involves allowing a linited number of non-paying online students to participate in the university's regular courses. The registered students and non-paying students work through the course together and all receive the full attention of the tutors. The difference is that the non-paying students get no academic credits at the end. However they can decide to register for the course during a limited period and become eligible for credits. If not they can still qualify for credit hours of prior learning.

As with Lane's course, participation is restricted (2-7 non-paying students per course) and the course is a far cry from the original network-based MOOCs. The intention is to let students try out a course in the hope that they will register as "real" students later on, either during the free course or afterwards. Only by registering can you convert your course into the hard currency of academic credits. The initiative is primarily aimed at students in the region and there are no ambitions to go global or massive.

With new variations on the theme appearing almost weekly I suspect it won't be too many days before I write again about MOOCs. But please let's find some new terminology, preferably not in the form of more acronyms.

Simulation for teachers

Iavante operating theatre. CC BY-SA Alastair Creelman

As part of the EFQUEL Innovation Forum we visited Iavante, an extremely impressive simulation centre for training medical staff and students in emergency situations. The centre had clinics, operating theatres, treatment rooms and waiting rooms where students and hospital staff could realistically practice realistic emergency situations with the help of sophisticated computer controlled dummies and real life actors. They even had a street where car accident scenarios could be re-enacted as well as a mock living room for emergency treatment in the home. All these rooms had cameras for filming the simulation from all angles for later analysis. This type of facility is of course very expensive but this type of training can save real lives later since the staff will be able to make mistakes in the simulation and get the chance to improve through practice and analysis.

Teachers are not involved in such life and death situations but it struck me that simulation training could save a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering in the classroom. Student teachers are often thrown in at the deep end and find themselves in front of classes of pupils who do not react in the ideal way no matter how pedagogically sound the student’s lesson plan may be. Students seldom get the chance to work out strategies for dealing with difficult classroom situations. The first experience is when it’s for real and of course there is a high risk that the situation will not be dealt with in a professional way. This can easily lead to students losing confidence in themselves and sometimes to dropping out of the course completely.

That’s why I was particularly interested in another session at the conference from a project called SimAULA. They have produced a computer simulation for trainee teachers to help them deal with difficult classroom situations. The simulation uses avatars in different types of classroom. The teacher can choose different classroom layouts to suit different pedagogical approaches and can plan the lesson using a wide variety of variables. The classes react in unpredictable ways and the students can try different tactics to deal with the situations that occur.

"SimAULA will setup a virtual practicum in the form of a three-dimensional, online world adapted in the context of teaching-learning in school. Both active teachers and teachers-to be will interact with avatars, develop lesson plans, and teach in the virtual classrooms. In order to provide interesting and effective learning activities, this project will focus on the pedagogical side based on the knowledge of teachers and pedagogic and psychology experts to define the behaviour model of the virtual students and create simulations and situations that are both pedagogically and educational sound."

A simulation like this not only gives students the chance to test different strategies but also plenty of scope for group discussion and reflection with the teacher afterwards. Computer simulation in teacher training offers the chance for students to make mistakes and learn without the stress of interacting with real classes. SimAULA show what can be done in this field and I'm sure more advanced and sophisticated simulations for teachers are on their way.

Quotes from EFQUEL Innovation Forum

Granada CC BY-SA Alastair Creelman

It's always hard to sum up a conference full of meetings, presentations, discussions and impressions. As one of the organizers of last week's EFQUEL Innovation Forum in Granada I was not always able to concentrate on all the sessions but I did manage to pick up a nice selection of quotes from our main speakers. Here are my favourites in no particular order:

“You can’t nail jelly to the wall”
Rory McGreal (Athabasca University) on the difficulties of defining the constantly shifting field of open education. 

“Most intellectual property is neither intellectual nor property”
Rory McGreal

"In the near future most students at university will be lifelong learners rather than traditional young students"
Tony Bates

"You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs"
Tony Bates on the future of higher education

"Traditional universities that don't recognise the move towards disaggregation will/might go the way of Kodak"
Rory McGreal

"Effective elearning means accepting loss of control"
Stephan Atsou

"Students coming out of high school aren't good at online learning"
Tomy Bates

"Resources are not courses. Courses are a pedagogical process"
Graham Attwell

"Learning environments have moved out of the educational establishment"
Graham Attwell

Peer reviewed teaching

  by  AJC1

In a discussion at the EFQUEL Innovation Forum in Granada this week we talked about the difficulties of creating a sharing culture in education. Teachers are traditionally expected to be self-sufficient; creating their own courses, managing their classes and writing their own course material. The idea of sharing your material with other teachers is still viewed with suspicion and sometimes even hostility. Letting other teachers and students see your material or watch your lessons and then provide feedback is the exception rather than the rule.

Let’s contrast this private and closed practice with established academic research practice. Research is constantly subjected to peer review and must be thoroughly referenced and justified. Once published you can expect critical review and debate around your conclusions. Isn’t it strange that the rules for research are not applied in the equally academic discipline of teaching? Why are learning resources hidden away on teachers’ hard drives or in desk drawers rather than being made accessible and subject to peer review and open for reuse?

The arguments for opening up educational and making resources open and freely available should focus on enabling a peer review system for teaching and learning. If courses are more open then students will be able to interact with other experts and lessen the dependency on one teacher whose view will inevitably be limited. If material is open it is reviewed and rated by students and teachers. The best material will be recommended, enhanced and reused. Poor material will often get feedback for improvement or at worst be ignored. The same goes for recorded lectures. We create a dynamic quality assurance system built around open discussion. Other more academic quality criteria can of course also be applied to the process but the principle is that openness can lead to higher quality.

Opening up our teaching for review and criticism is not a revolutionary idea. It is simply applying the rigour of research review to the field of teaching which for too long has been allowed to hide from public view. If we want to improve the quality of education, classroom or online, then we must dare to share.