A vision for open door classrooms. Or maybe a reality in some places already? At the very least something to aspire to!

While browsing the materials connected to the #MOOCMOOC, I got a bit side-tracked and came across a slide show by Jesse Stommel on Open Door Classrooms. That slide show brought up a lot of points that resonated with me, for example “We need to recognize that the best learning happens not inside courses, but between them”. SO TRUE!

There are several tips on how to adapt content for an Open Door Classroom, one of which I particularly like: “Realize that content is not actually a marker of expertise. From the first moments of a course, relinquish (some, but perhaps not all) authority and model uncertainty. Say directly that the course will focus less on the expertise of a teacher and more on the growing expertise of students.”.  And the next one: “Student-generated content is the stuff of learning. And it can’t be populated into a learning management system in advance of the students’ arrival to the course”. And the next one, and the one after that, and then the one after that. Check it out below!

I found this slide show so very inspiring. I am currently “protecting” this blog by the strictest creative commons licence, CC BY-NC-ND. When I chose that license, I was thinking that if anyone wanted to use any of the materials I present here and modify them for their own purposes, all they needed to do was get in touch with me to get my permission, which I have no reason of withholding. By not using a more open license, I was hoping to have people contact me, thus providing opportunities for discussion, potential cooperation and definitely interesting contacts. But now, inspired by the slide show above, I am wondering whether I shouldn’t have used a less restrictive licence to begin with. People who want to talk to me would still do that, and everybody else, who might do great things with my materials, is now prohibited from using them and thus I am keeping my thoughts from being developed further by others.

I am still a little reluctant about changing the license, because I do put a lot of time into this blog and I really wish people got in touch with me if they liked and wanted to use my work, but I feel like my stand on this might be changing right now. So if you see my license change, you know why: Because of that slide show!