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Resist social networking at your peril: Open University VC
The next wave of change in further education will be fast and incredibly disruptive. It will happen when education meets social networking and it will be exciting as well as scary, the vice-chancellor of Britain’s Open University (OU), Martin Bean, told an audience of already scared listeners at the Higher Education Congress in Sydney last week.
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It is true that educators up until the last decade or so have determined learning content and delivery and that educators will now have to become more responsible in assisting students on how to to assign credibility and sense to the vast amount of information that they now have ready access to (Horizon, 2012). Students also need to be assisted and guided in how to use the various social media as collaborative learning environments (Grant, 2009) since, to date, they value these spaces more for the social support they provide. Therefore, some degree of co-designing of learning goals may need to be incorporated into education (McLoughlin & Lee, 2010). In this regards, universities up to know may have been slow to adapt. However, universities are also constrained by societal and political expectations of measurable scales of educational attainment in their graduants (Athanasou & Lamprianou, 2003). I wonder how industry would view comparative assessments of graduates’ grades based on the endorsements and critiques of the students’ blogs rather than derived from some form of standardised assessments?