Lalonde’s goal was to create the ability to offer open licensed systems for educators to utilize for courses, with wide adoptability and adaptability within the BC post-secondary system and beyond.
I wouldn’t necessarily call these barriers, but they will have added more work: reviewing all of the areas that required different platforms, and then narrowing down to STEM and either Social Sciences or Humanities due to high volume enrolment allows for narrowing the scope, and finding the bugs in order to move into other platforms.
A major issue though would be buy-in from institutions, staff, students, tech support. Weller and Anderson share how “Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing” (2013) would change the post-secondary institutes. Keep in mind, Weller and Anderson’s article is 12 years old, and technology moves so fast that something that was ‘new’ a year ago is now considered a dinosaur!
By or through his forward thinking, Lalonde realized that there will be gaps, even with broad platform planning. Forward thinking also made them see that 1st and 2nd year, high enrollment courses were where these systems would have the greatest value, keeping in mind savings to students which was the main reason for this plan. Shirkey’s thought on this was similar in saying that “MOOCs expand the audience for education from current campus students to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system” (Weller & Anderson, 2013, p. 56)
Knowing that the cost of post-secondary education is only getting higher year by year and being able to target those students with free software give all students a level education playing ground and allows them to see beyond what they may have seen possible for their education. Technology has the ability to share information world wide. As Hall and Wind note “technology offers reach, usability, accessibility and timely feedback, it is a key to developing a resilient higher education” (Weller & Anderson, 2013, p. 54).
Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013). Digital Resilience in Higher Education. European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 16(1).
Laverne LRNT525