Education started with a single educator teaching a single student. This model has evolved over time, with educators teaching larger and larger groups of students. Now, technology, such as MOOCs, is pushing an even more imbalanced model, with one teacher working with 20,000 or more students. But what if technology, powered by open educational resources (OER), could scale the one-to-one teaching experience - not the classroom size? While the rise of MOOCs allow for mass attendance in courses, scaling up class sizes does not scale up the valuable, personalized teacher-student relationship. However, additional innovations in technology can address the issue of oversized classes.
The wealth of OER online provides a solution - with technology, we can make personalized teacher-student relationships possible in a large classroom setting. The accessibility of OER in the classroom is a huge potential game changer in how educators, institutions and students see technology and open education. The volume of OER content has reached critical mass and OER now is uniquely positioned to scale the teacher-student relationship. Unlike closed content, open resources can be experimented with by many educators, students, and learning systems without risk of copyright issues. The volume of experimentation with open content will dwarf the adaptive learning tests done by traditional, closed content publishers. With more smart people trying many different ideas, it will be OER that is the backbone of the adaptive, scaled teacher technologies.
Building open, personalized instruction channels opens the floodgates for students to get real-time responses to their individual needs, as they would in a historical one-on-one teacher-student relationship. Technology enables a scaled teacher relationship with personalized content that is structured and modularized, asynchronous student-paced learning, and competency-based education not driven by seat time.
To fuel this teacher-student relationship, educators have a wealth of open educational resources to pull from. These resources are open to remixing and repurposing in education, are customizable to students with different learning styles, and there?s no shortage of information to go around. Learning products that organize OER into modular content that can be customized for students? needs and enhance a personalized teacher-student relationship.
