Guest speaker

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Tuesday November 3, 2020

Collaboration and MOOCs

9:00–9:40AM

Open Learning, Open Networks: Online Learning in 2020

Open online learning entered the mainstream with the growth and popularity of MOOCs a half dozen years ago, but it is only in the last six months that we have seen the full potential of a broader open learning infrastructure. Educators have been forced to learn quickly what works online and what doesn’t. In this talk Stephen Downes outlines the challenges this evolving model poses to learning providers and educational institutions and recommends policies and processes to meet them. In particular, he will focus on his experience working on projects using on new approaches and new technologies that will help governments and institutions build an open learning infrastructure: distributed social networks, cloud infrastructures and virtualization, immersive reality, and personal learning environments. He will describe steps that can be taken now to create accessible and engaging open online learning and outline some of the new tools that will be available to educators and developers in the coming years.