Author: Khushboo

The word “university” is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which means “community of teachers and scholars.” This description seems to be modified with the advent of technology and has changed the way knowledge is delivered with many other aspects of university changing around the world as well. The future universities will have a much more influence of technology and globalization. Imaging a future university is interesting but at the same time challenging as most of us, students would like to change so many things about it.

A few things which strike me that should be considered while developing new courses or strategizing university’s advancement, include: a) monitoring the supply and demand of the employment market, and adjusting programs and enrollment as necessary, b) looking for sustainable funding mechanism so that burden on students could be lowered, and c) increase in the transparency of administration and allowing students access to decision-making tools.

Some of the info graphics which pop up on typing MOOC and Higher Ed is the one shown below. The word-cloud represents a number of things about MOOC such as type of platform, stakeholders, and its components.

The term MOOC was coined in 2008 and means /Massive Open Online Course, but it was 2012 that The New York Times dubbed “the year of the MOOC”. That was the year that MOOC providers Coursera, Udacity, edX and FutureLearn were all launched – the former two by Stanford academics. There are now about 4,200 MOOCs offered by more than 500 universities. Last year, 35 million students signed up for at least one of them: up from an estimated 16 to 18 million the previous year.

There have been a number of positive impacts due to increasing number of such platforms, such as Elevated appreciation for the profession of teaching, Team-based course design, and Creation of new space for experimentation. But despite their consistent growth, the quality of this type of course – in which students typically receive little, if any, personal interaction from academics, and class sizes are in the thousands – has long been questioned. There are some questions which need to be answered to understand the effect of such online platforms:

• What is the quality/credibility of courses developed on such platforms?
• How many people complete these courses?
• What is the experience being offered through these courses?
• What is the motive behind upcoming platforms? Is it profit driven?

It is rightly pointed out by Hennessy in conversation with the Times Higher Education that the invention of the massive open online course (MOOC) is “not the kind of revolutionary thing I think people were hoping for. It’s not a disrupter,” adding that the development of online education in general still has a long way to go before it is in a position to challenge traditional campuses. He further added, “We’re very good at concluding that we’ve found the silver bullet before we’ve done the test to determine whether it really is a silver bullet.”

It is not just MOOCs but a number of other online platforms for providing courses but how many of these are worthy, should be the question.

How the change in knowledge delivery affects the various actors involved in the process

The world is witnessing a changing future of information delivery. Emergence of online courses and programs will surely reduce the economic and geographic barriers which exist presently in the society.  The author of “The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere” Kevin Carey discusses the advantages as well disadvantages of MOOC and similar online courses/ platforms available. The author mentions that the upcoming online platforms will make higher education more competitive. The universities will have to adopt a hybrid approach in order to stay in the competition. Technological advancement and freedom provides both, the teacher and the student, to reach out to a bigger audience as well as connect with them as per their convenience. But, the virtual process takes away the charm of teacher-student environment of a class.

The technology helps people to perform their tasks more efficiently and provide individual with a more personalized educational experience. But the experience of working together in a group (for example a studio or a group activity) and solving a problem cannot be recreated on an online platform. The engagement of students and teacher in a physical class cannot be replicated through an online class. The universities are not just places where people come to get educated in fact these are the places where people become educated and socially responsible citizen. The presence of  facilities like sports, arts and craft, music, dramatics, etc in a university make an individual aware about the surrounding and helps him/her to become a better individual not just educated.

I believe that the definition of knowledge does not depends on the mode of its delivery. Therefore the knowledge delivered through online platforms or regular classes remain the same. It is just the way it is been delivered changes and sometimes is much more efficient than the regular classes. In addition to this, one thing which surely changes, is the perspective of the recipient, as the experience of knowledge reception changes entirely. 

Some of the positives and negatives of such platform can also be found on MOOC and Higher Ed

What is Open Access?

Open Access refers to online research outputs that are free of all restrictions on access (e.g. access tolls) and free of many restrictions on use (e.g. certain copyright and license restrictions). Most publishers own the rights to the articles in their journals. Anyone who wants to read the articles must pay to access them. Although many researchers can access the journals they need via their institution and think that access is free, in reality it is not. The institution has often been involved in lengthy negotiations around the price of their site license and reuse of this content is limited.

Here is an example of an Open Access Journal in the field of Urban Planning describing its Open Access Policy.

The Urban Planning (ISSN: 2183-7635) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal of urban studies aimed at advancing understandings and ideas of humankind’s habitats – villages, towns, cities, megacities – in order to promote progress and quality of life. The Editors in Chief include: Luca D’Acci (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Andrew Hudson-Smith (University College London) and Steffen Lehmann (University of Portsmouth). It is indexed in Web of Science (ESCI), DOAJ and other databases. The Cogitatio Press is based in Lisbon, Portugal.

This journal has an institutional membership and is destined for institutions, groups and societies that wish to cover the whole cost of open access publishing and allow their authors to freely publish and disseminate their articles to a broader readership. Virginia Tech is one such institution and covers the article processing charges (APC) of all articles authored by corresponding authors of the institution that have no other sources of funding available (this agreement is not valid for papers resulting from research sponsored by agencies that allow allocations for APCs). This agreement is valid as of 1 September 2016.

Numerous disciplines and perspectives are involved in the process of understanding urban phenomena. The journal is founded on the premise that qualitative linked to quantitative approaches provide mutually sympathetic outcomes for adding knowledge to the complex and polyhedral system par antonomasia as the city is.

The journal brings urban science and urban planning together with other cross-disciplinary fields such as sociology, ecology, psychology, technology, politics, philosophy, geography, environmental science, economics, maths and computer science, to understand processes influencing urban forms and structures, their relations with environment and life quality, with the final aim to identify patterns towards progress and quality of life.

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. All of Cogitatio’s journals are open access, that is, they can be accessed free of charge by any reader, anywhere in the world, regardless of affiliation. This means that not only researchers backed by well-funded institutions, but also policy-makers, NGOs, journalists, practitioners, students, and an interested public have free access to the research articles. This increases the exposure gained by new works and allows them to be disseminated to a much wider audience than is possible through traditional subscription journals.

According to Cogitatio Press, open access publication also helps correct the information bias towards the developed world, where institutions are much more likely to have the resources to subscribe to journals than elsewhere. Cogitatio is committed to the democratisation of knowledge, and open access which means that any researcher from any institution, anywhere in the world is able to access the full extent of our publications with no subscription fees.

Furthermore, unlike traditional journals, Cogitatio does not assume copyright for articles published through open access. This means that the authors retain the copyright to their own works and are free to distribute them as they wish. Once again, this allows authors to maximise the audience their works are able to reach, rather than tying them to a limited audience of subscribers.

People who are reading this may have heard of the ‘Opens’ be it Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Science and Open Pedagogy. But I would request you through this blog to talk to at least one person about Open Access and talk to them about publishing in Open access journals.

References

Cogitatio Press. Retrieved from: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/index

Public Library of Science. “Benefits of Open Access Journals. Retrieved from “https://www.plos.org/open-access/

Suber, Peter. “Open Access Overview” Archived 2007-05-19 at the Wayback Machine.Earlham.edu. Retrieved on 2011-12-03.