This is another guest post – this time from Laura Dewis – Communications Manager at the Open University and regular glutton for punishment at all manner of unconference type events..
TogetherLearn is in beta and while I haven’t got through the door it is looking interesting from the doormat. A “turn-key platform where knowledge workers can collaborate” it’s all about self service learning. Other buzz words include open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, and responsive. This is the 
brainchild of some pretty brainy people – Jay Cross, the man who coined the term ‘elearning’ and thinks blended learning is bull****, Jane Hart, social media and learning consultant, Clark Quinn, a cognitive design expert and Harold Jarche a consultant in Enterprise 2.0.
Jay advocates informal learning as the most effective form of learning and knowledge sharing. In a recent article ‘Informal learning is the future‘ he explains why they are charging for TogetherLearn – a radical concept in a world of free services and freemium business models.
“We had thought about giving this away but this means that business wouldn’t take it seriously. We spend three days with the user of this service to make sure it is properly supported with community champions and make sure it is kept alive. That is vital to make online learning communities work well.”
The mention of community champions suggests that providing support is critical to a ‘bottom-up’ informal learning platform, yet this isn’t the traditional support provided by tutors in an educational system. Jay says the role of the teacher is changing and the days of the ‘sage on the stage’ are numbered. This is something that people working in Open Educational Resources have been musing on for some time, with The Open University’s Giselle Ferreira talking at Online Educa Berlin last week on Who Needs Teachers Anyway?. How is a world of free quality educational content and tools changing the role of the teacher?
Universities are increasingly opening up access to their course materials, but consider their teaching staff part of the premium service that paying ‘customers’ get access to. If access to education is going to become truely democratic and transformative, do technologies need to replicate the sense making and motivation a teacher provides to their students? Can they? (I’m thinking of an app that can replicate my favourite history teacher standing on a chair playing the role of Cromwell while a Blackadder video plays in the background).
Can communities provide volunteer mentors? Who is the mentor, the coach, the trainer, the teacher and the tutor? (I feel a joke or a Christmas carol coming on… three tutors marking, four forums facilitated, five gold stars).
There are numerous websites out there that are reliant on the tutor-student relationship. P2P University is about to launch in order to fill some of the support gaps that exist in use of Open Educational Resources, with some interesting approaches to payment and mentors. Beanbag Learning helps parents find tutors for their children. School of Everything is opening minds to the idea we all have something to teach and something to learn, a nod to the shift in hierarchy between student and teacher that is happening in a technology enabled world.
If it is generally accepted that tutors have a role, but that role is changing, what does it look like? In the future will we select teachers by their Teacherati rating? What skills will a teacher need to rise to the top of the search engines? Will learners best construct courses from a variety of freely available content and tools? Will our degrees be granted by an individual expert, cutting out the university as a middleman institution? And what can we learn from teacherpreneurs?
Ummm… maybe the answer is out there in a community forum? Or do I need an expert?