Abstract
A successful international learning initiative focusing on student agency began with a link facilitating OE-enhanced teaching between a UK university and a US high school class. It became an international trip organised and funded by five UK students and their teacher who travelled to California, teaching and performing music across formal and informal learning settings. The project is now a credit-bearing class, retaining the original initiative’s openness within the university curriculum where final-year students collaborate with the teacher, self-organising to design and plan curricular details from travel logistics to musical interactions. Students engage in heutagogy, demonstrating the highest levels of autonomous, personal learning in this co-learning environment. Their assessment, a reflective journal, encourages engage with deeper learning processes. The original trip was documented as an eBook including 10,000 student-authored words telling their collaborative learning journey. The book was published without DRM an accessible model for other students and educators.
Highlights
Institutional learning is seldom without constraints; teachers navigate timetables, content, criteria, and resources as they devise and deliver the best possible learning experiences for the students
The Psychology of Learning & Teaching class that I teach in the Music Department at the University of Chichester, has always engaged in various open educational practices: there is no text book, students are encouraged to reach out to the wider musical and teaching community to both seek information and apply concepts discussed in class
In 2015 a series of opportunities to connect and work across disciplines and cultures resulted in a dramatic change to the pattern of teaching and learning, beginning with a connection with Righetti High School’s English class’ teacher David Preston, in California, to explore issues of communication, motivation, and general interpersonal interactions when learning music
Summary
Institutional learning is seldom without constraints; teachers navigate timetables, content, criteria, and resources as they devise and deliver the best possible learning experiences for the students. Much of the taught content in higher education is personalised to focus on a specialism or type of student, a further step is required to transform this into truly personal learning where students initiate, create, and control their learning (for an in-depth discussion of personalised vs personal learning see Downes, 2017). Moate and Posti-Ahokas (2016) stress the importance of innovating to create opportunity and mainstreaming internationalisation within university curricula, as “higher education institutions are to prepare global citizens for the uncertain future, where people, work and all matters are more interconnected than ever before”
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