The topic and content of this week stood out to me these week as again reconsidering open learning and its application on my own educational experiences. Reassessing the learning activities and assignments I’ve completed in terms of their meaningfulness and renewability as per open learning criteria, I believe I’ve come to realize how limited in scope they have been. Limited in the sense that my learning was often limited to a small cohort and that the insights I made or were provided were in had/shared with so few. Yet while most of the assignment criteria provided were “disposable”, I do believe that had I wanted to, I could have implemented open learning methods to make an assignment more “renewable”. Of course these efforts would have made my assignments more difficult and time-consuming, and would’ve likely had negligible improvement to my grades, they may have had a more significant educational impact for myself. This does, however, lead to the question does open learning and renewable assignments guarantee a more effective and learning-meaningful form of activity-based learning? I suppose certain STEM assignments or fields may be less predisposed to learning through renewable assignments,

In reflection of the overall educational experience, understanding how approaching your own learning can improve meaningfulness, personal understanding, and open communication with peers and others. Balancing meeting assignment/artifact criteria and expectations while also ensuring personal, open learning is a difficult task. This is almost obviously true as our typical courses are still face-to-face, distributed, and/or rigidly organized. Our traditional course structures still offer the benefit of grading, distinguishing standardized academic achievement, and structure, which are an easy method for universities to assess the success of their students. With this in mind, can our post-secondary and major learning institutions develop or transition to an open learning environment (or more specifically, implementing Open Education Practices) while still maintaining such structure? Personally, I believe that “open” and “closed” learning will remain adjacent forms of learning, both of which have their places in our learning experiences (at least with our current technological limitations). However, I do believe that the traditional “closed” learning experiences we have will also gradually transition or adapt (i.e. Revise, Remix, Redistribute, and some of the other R’s) some “open” learning principles or practices, such as open educational resources as more and more people desire to learn.