A Free and Open Course:

The ne(x)t generation learner - Skills you need in lifelong learning

knowledge and information societies

About the course 1

Career relevance (Why should I take this course?) 2
For whom is this course? 2
Course structure 2
Course activities 4
Course environment and spaces 5
Course Language 5
Available places 5
Course time schedule 5
Contacts 5

About the course

Firstly of all, this course is free: free to attend without any charge, free of cost for books
or other materials, free for anyone independently of prior education; and free in terms of
your personal time commitment that you decide to dedicate to it (Though we would like
you to spend on a minimum 2 hours per week). The only thing you will need is a PC
and internet access.
The objective of this course is for you to become a knowledgeable ne(x)t generation
learner that:
• Is able to update his skills and knowledge self-dependently within a lifelong
learning context
• Knows how to take full advantage of the web to support your own learning, to
collaborate with others and use the tools required to do so
• Is capable to find sources at the web and to critically evaluate and analyse them
• Is aware about available free online and desktop software solutions that facilitate
learning, knowledge exchange and collaboration
• Knows how to find online communities, to engage in them for personal support,
and to and understands the way they function
• Has the today’s required soft skills; like to communicate, collaborate and engage
in discussions with others, defend your own work and thoughts and present
them, know how to manage a project, or how to resolve conflicts
The course is supposed to be an open and participatory learning experience that
involves practical ‘hands-on’ sessions where your learning activities and the things you
create will become a part of the course. This is to say that future course participants
should be enabled to benefit from your achievements and build upon the things you
started, instead of starting from scratch.
The course will allow you to act not only as a learner, but to become an active
contributor and co-creator. You will be asked to establish your own course learning

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projects or to join into course learning projects of others; and you also will have a voice
to tell us what you think this course still needs.
This course is a pilot course in the light of free and open education. Participants of this
course can expect tutoring (support), but will not receive any official degree awarding
certificate or credit points from the course team.

Career relevance (Why should I take this course?)

Knowledge is becoming obsolete faster and faster and if you are a 4 years’ university
student you might see that half of what you learned during your first year will be out of
date by your third year of study.
Today’s learner are likely to have on an average 10 to 14 different jobs by the age of 38
and the top 10 in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004 – how will you prepare for
this? You are preparing yourself for jobs that might not even exist yet, that demand the
use of technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems that you don’t
know are problems yet.
Universities and formal education at large struggle to update their courses within these
shorter and shorter cycles or to develop new ones, and lessons are still largely given like
100 years ago.
This is why YOU NEED TO KNOW how to take advantage of the web for YOUR
PERSONAL LEARNING NEEDS to have a COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE at
today’s JOB MARKET.
Some illustrating and brief sources for a better understanding on this can be found here.

For whom is this course?

The target groups of this course are:
• Students in formal education on a individual base
• Free learner outside of formal education on a individual base
• Educators (Teachers) that like to participate with their students at this course and
might want to feed parts of it into their own courses (and vice versa)
There is no minimum age limit, nor any minimum prior educational requirements.

Course structure
The course will be divided into two phases, a course design phase and the course itself,
as illustrated below. BUT: You are not required to participate at the design phase in
order to take the actual course!
During the initial course design (12/07 – 03/08) you will have the opportunity to add
your topics of interest to a wish- list and to suggest activities and sources. We also
encourage you to go beyond this and invite you to become an active co-creator of this
course and to bring in your first hand knowledge and insights.
During the actual course phase (03/08 – 07/08) you will have the option to create your
own course learning projects or to join into the projects of others. Additionally you will
be able to learn from reviewing and studying the project activities, outcomes and
presentations of the other course’s learning projects.

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After the end of the course we will go into a re-design phase (07/08 – 09/08) and use the
results of the first course to improve it before we will run an updated version.
Participants at the first round of this course are encouraged to contribute to the course
re-design and are welcome to also engage at the second round of the course (09/08 –
02/09).

Unlike traditional courses this course does not expect participants to solely study pre-
outlined course materials, instead the course is envisioned as a collaborative learning
experience where participants will gain exposure to the various conceptual issues
through collaboration with each other. One goal in the execution of this course is to
think of this course as a seed, rather than a finished product.

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Course activities
During the course you will
• Engage in personally meaningful activities by working in concrete projects that
you will set up or join within your area of interest to create solutions to ill-
structured problems
• Establish project teams and team roles, including work assignments and
roadmaps
• Search for and engage with available online content and communities
• Re-experience how others learn at the web
• Create materials yourself and share your project results with others and reflect
on them
• Integrate your contributions into the course so future learner would be able to
build on them
• Use a broad range of collaborative technologies
• Present your project results, learn from the presentation of others and discuss
those results.
You will be asked to establish your own project or join into the project of others. Those
projects can be seen as “learning projects” within the overalls course objective

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Course environment and spaces
The course environment and main spaces will be the NetGeners.Net space, but will also
include a range of further web spaces. The web is disperse and using a broad range of
environments and spaces will help you to get familiar with it.
The NetGeners.Net space will be used for general course information, as a space for you
to present yourself and for communication through e.g. chat or forums. It will also be
used for project works as it allows collaborative work on content and to smoothly
integrate your learning projects into the overall course.
Other used web spaces might include blogs (e.g. Wordpress), online content repositories
(e.g. the UNESCO's Open Training platform), spaces that allow presenting and sharing
multimedia works (e.g. Slideshare or Youtube), collaborative development spaces (e.g.
Wikiversity or Google Docs) and online communities (such as Jiskha, PhysicsForums
and many more).

Course Language
The overall language of this course is English, though participants might start their own
learning projects within their respective language, but would be asked to present a short
summary of their projects’ results in English.

Available places
Initial number of places that support can be granted for: 50
Initial number of places with learner-to-learner support: unlimited
This course asks you to become a project co-coordinator of your own learning project
and to establish your own project team. As more of you will decide to become a project
co-ordinator, as more we are to provide some type of guidance and support for project
teams ;-)

Course time schedule

1. Course design phase: 1st of December 2007 to 14th of March 2008
1.1. Wish list closes at: 29th of February 2008
2. First course round: 17th of March 2008 to 17th of July 2008
3. Course update: 21st of July 2008 to 17th of September 2008
3.1. Wish-list closes at: 8th of August 2008
4. Second course round: 22nd of September 2008 to 20th of February 2009
If you missed a start date you still can jump on and join in at a later stage. We just ask
you to check the current stage of where we are first!

Contacts
This course will be run by Andreas Meiszner (a.meiszner@open.ac.uk)
Research fellow at Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, UK
Project Coordinator of the European Union funded FLOSSCom project