Today’s real-world challenges are complex, rarely straightforward and lack ‘one right answer’. However, today’s education is often based on existing static knowledge where teachers instruct what students have to think. Alternative thought pathways are closed, instead students are funneled towards using single solutions derived from past problems rather than opening them so that they are prepared for solving future multi-faceted problems. Teachers mostly do believe that they are empowered to fill the inner of their students with known facts and procedures to understand existing situations.. We believe that education should also work outer wards to create solutions from our societal challenges and aims.​

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The crashing lapse in education is thus designed for a world in which we no longer live. The way we are taught misleads us about who we are: the actual ego-inner, and where we stand: the real-life eco-outer. Actually, education should strive for connecting both the ego-inner with the eco-outer in a living and dynamic dialogue where the teacher becomes a reflective constructor in and on action.  And where the teacher should have faith in the great strength of young people who can work together from their hearts in a time when a crisis can no longer be denied. We know that young people say: "we have become dictating devices, with computer algorithms brains who can only still reproduce procedures what has been taught to us ... But the young people also do have a heart ... opened and prepared for societal challenges to come ".​ Not opening up the student and only using instructive teaching methods also has a very negative side effect: students soon forget what they have been taught because they have not been engaged, did not get excited and were unconnected. If we want that students become persistent learners then we should facilitate learning, not teaching. So the question remains how to integrate the human learning into education.  

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The new and integrative Open Design Learning concept (ODLc) is an answer to this: we do want to school and cooperate with young people becoming capable and not afraid to solve problems from the unknown, who want to work on eco-outer world problems warming themselves with engagement and enthusiasm and who are in intimate connection with their ego-inner and others. ODLc forms the fundamental basis for creating ‘open, integrative and persistent learners’ by developing open-ended design solutions for their self-chosen systems or projects of interest.​

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This website serves as an open-source ODLc-hub that operationalizes it by showcasing the best practices of the ODLc in higher education. To learn more or to share your view on schooling the next generation students please contact us. Together with you, we would like to grow an open-design.school  by exchanging new ways of education and further developing ODLc both centrally together and locally tweaked to your needs and specifics. We hope meeting you and becoming a local open-design hub soon!

 

For more information, see our EDUCON paper.

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