I have just finished three free four week courses on the Australian Open2Study platform.

The first course was Teaching Adult Learners

The next course was Entrepreneurship and Family Business

And the third course was Indigenous Studies, looking at Australian Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and New Zealand Maori.

 

Teaching Adult Learners

This was a great course, with lots of ideas and I took a lot away from it. I have taught several classes on a variety of subjects but I haven’t done much with adult learners. I did think that a lot of what was said about adult learners would or should apply to children, especially older children.

Entrepreneurship and Family Business

This was an interesting and encouraging course, but it wasn’t terribly well organised and I’m not sure by the end of it whether I am any the wiser about how to start and run a business at all. One thing I will say though is that the course leader, Leon Levine does kind of embody the entrepreneurial spirit, from the point of view that he obviously isn’t an academic, but he has enough perseverance and determination to be doing a PhD!

Indigenous Studies

This was my favourite of the three courses. I had a very limited knowledge both of the Maori and the Australian Aborigines, so the history was fascinating as well as rather heartbreaking and quite appalling altogether. I saw a lot of parallels between the way the British treated the natives there and the way the native British (Welsh, Cornish and Scottish) were put down and oppressed and marginalised.

 

I particularly like the Open2Study platform – all the lessons are delivered by video, with a short ‘pop quiz’ question afterwards and a longer quiz after each module. You also earn reward badges for everything you complete, and even though there’s not much going on in the forum, there’s plenty of feedback on Twitter for example.

Each module is a week long, and I didn’t realise that there’s a deadline for the final assessment which I missed although I managed to pass based on my points from the previous modules.

Altogether though, I am really glad I did them, and the Open2Study platform will definitely attract me back again for more courses.