Open education as a technology of the twenty-first century

Автор: Дяченко Т.Ф.
Источник: Тезизы доклада на научной студенческой конференции «New tendencies of socio-economic development of modern society» ,23 апреля 2008г.,Донецкий государственный университет управления, Донецк.

Open education is a collective term that refers to forms of education in which knowledge , ideas or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure are shared freely over the Internet.

Open education is concerned with erasing the formalized roles of student and teacher; learning itself is rarely given to more than two or three pupils at a time and the same material is hardly ever presented to the class as a whole. Growing out of principles developed at British infant and junior schools, it first became popular in American elementary schools during the late 1960s. Many of its ideas were enunciated earlier by those involved in the progressive education movement.

Principles of the open education:

1. Entering high school without any competetive examinations.
2. Open planning of learning - independence of compiling individual educational programs via selection from the system of courses.
3. Free choice of time and intensity of studying - enrolment of students proceeds the entire year. There are no fixed terms of the academic year.
4. Freedom in the selection of the place of learning - students can physically be absent from the classrooms, they can independently select where to be trained.
5. Using the principle “Learning through entire life” instead of the principle “Learning for life”.
6. Transition from the student’s movement towards the knowledge to the reverse process.
7. Free development of individuality is the basic factor of the open education. The classical model of education assumes the harsh norms which unify the human individuality.

• Using of specialized technologies and tools of learning - computers, network tools , multimedia technologies, specialized software for the preparation of training courses and learning of students;
• Test control quality of received knowledge using computer test systems;
• Economic effectiveness - improvement in the balance of the achieved result to the expenditures of time, money and other resources in comparison with the traditional forms of learning;
• Flexibility - possibility to be trained at any convenient time, place and at the convenient pace.
• Modularity - possibility to form the individual training program corresponding to personal needs from the selection of the independent training courses.
• Parallelism - possibility to combine learning and basic professional activity.
• New role of teacher -this form requires coordination of cognitive process, correction of the content of subject, tuition, management of training projects using computer and network technologies.
• New role of trainee - increasing requirements to students’ self-organizing, motivation, skills of independent work.
• Implementation of information technologies - the technologies based on the computer equipment, the computer networks, multimedia systems.
• Possibility to export and import educational services.

The open education in Ukraine does not satisfy the requirements of highly developed society and it does not ensure the valuable entry of Ukraine into the international educational space.

So that the system would occupy the proper place in the education system of Ukraine, it is necessary, first of all, to create the global computer network of education and science. Computer gives the possibility to obtain training material; it is the simultaneous library, and the center of reference information and a communicative center, which makes it one of the participants in the implementation of the program of ‘education through the entire life’ in Ukraine.

Open education is a living idea. As the movement grows, this idea will continue to evolve.