‘It’s changed my life’. Online volunteering as a means of supporting learning. [1941] Members : #OER18

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Thu, Apr 19 2018, 11:00am – 12:00pm

Authors: Anna Comas-Quinn

Room: Waterside 2

Theme: Open and Learners

Type: Lightning Talks

Description

Learners are increasingly involved in online activities outside the classroom, which could potentially support and complement their formal learning. These activities often capitalize on the opportunities afforded by open content and open technologies that support more collaborative and democratic practices (O’Hagan, 2016). Educators wanting to move towards more open educational practices (Beetham et al, 2012) would benefit from increased awareness of these activities and a better understanding of how to harness them to provide a more situated and authentic learning experience (Kiraly et al, 2016) for their learners.

This lightning talk reports on a doctoral research project exploring the experiences of online volunteers in an open translation project who plan to become professional translators, and how they perceive these volunteering experiences in relation to their educational and professional aspirations. The data was collected through interviews conducted with volunteers from across the world, identified through a short questionnaire placed in the group’s Facebook page.

In this short talk I will present the surprisingly wide range of motivations for joining this online activity, and volunteers’ perceptions of their participation as a way to support their learning before, during, after and, in some cases, instead of formal education.

Beetham, H., Falconer, I., McGill, L. & Littlejohn, A. (2012). JISC Open Practices: Briefing paper.

Kiraly et al (eds) (2016), Towards Authentic Experiential Learning in Translator Education, Mainz: Mainz University Press.

O’Hagan, M. (2016). Massively Open Translation: Unpacking the Relationship Between Technology and Translation in the 21^st Century. International Journal of Communication, 10(2016), 929-946.

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