Connected community and Peer Review are the two attributes I learned about open education that I had experience on.
Connected community is one of the essential eight attributes of Open Pedagogy. In order to join the connected community, “the conduit of social media and other technology is needed” (Bronwyn, 9). I had an experience in one of my course project of constructing an Intel 4004 CPU chip where my teammates and I communicated by Slack and Gitlab. This experience made me think that it is so true that using the social media within a learning community not only the connectivity, but also “sharing of resource and knowledge” (Bronwyn 9). When we were using slack, we were always staying transparent and talking about our codes on the general channel. In this way, everybody saw each other’s code so that everyone knows how our learning ability and coding ability is. Also, no matter how easy the question is, we talked about the question on the general channel to stay transparent. In this way, team trust was built as our learning community strengthened our connectivity.
Peer Review would also be one of the critical eight attributes of Open Pedagogy. In one of my course about learning Agile methodologies, teams were working distributively on a project for a remote client. In that project, my team implemented three basic Agile practices: Sprint planning meeting, daily stand-ups, and sprint retrospective. I used Zoom to do online video conferencing with my teammates, sharing my own thoughts and ideas about the implementation of features for the project. Everyone in our team shared their ideas without the fear of being reproached, which is also one of the key communication strategy in a scrum team. We created a safe online environment for everyone to share their ideas. If the environment was not as that supportive, “fear of criticism from peers [could be] shown to inhibit engagement in an open learning community” (Bronwyn 10). Therefore, what I also learned from open education is that Peer review is an important strategy to perform well in a distributed team. (342 words)
References:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44430383?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents
Picture:
Erik Yu 