I personally found this weeks reading very engaging and fairly easy to read and follow as dabbled into the history and context of distributed and open learning.

Something that i found pretty interesting is how far back open learning dates back to; no official year but traces back to as early as the 1970s (with open education in schools) which was a shocker to me because I was under the assumption that open learning was fairly recent however, that was far from the truth.  Also seeing the progression (evolution)  by integrating different forms such as E-learning & online eduction, Open access publishing, OER, Open practices, Social Media and MOOCs is very interesting, especially since the all seem to have a predicted point at which they will be ‘outgrown’, however Distance education & online education seems to be fairly constant since the 1980s.

I also found the explanation supporting the use of Social media for teaching very interesting. Howard Rheingold mentioned that social media is flooded with useful information and data that can be used for learning purposes and I 100% second it! Despite modern social media being plagued with a lot of meaningless entertainment, there still exists an abundance of educational pages, channels and hashtags that can be used by a variety of students.

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 76-108)

Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017). Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.