Open Online Courses: Responding to Design Challenges

Abstract

Open education and open educational resources movement as a recent trend in higher education focuses on providing free access to a wide range of educational resources and online courses. However, such a narrow approach fails to acknowledge the transformative and innovative opportunities openness can offer in higher education. The authors of the paper take a wider perspective to the concept of openness in formal higher education. In addition to open technology, content and knowledge sharing openness in course design is an important dimension to consider. Although open online course design solves many educational problems and challenges, at the same time it also creates new ones. This paper discusses about the re-occurring course design challenges that facilitators face while designing and running open courses. Through a multiple case study a variety of design responses to the design challenges is analyzed and demonstrated.