This session presents a student-led international open learning initiative that was then integrated into the university curriculum as a credit-bearing class, and disseminated to the wider community as an eBook. It began with a link facilitating OE enhanced classroom-based teaching between a university music class in England and a high school English class in California. The high school teacher extended an invitation to the university students to meet their high school collaborators, and this became a major international trip that sat completely outside the course curriculum. Five students worked together to organise and fund the trip from the UK to California to lead workshops and perform music with a variety of teachers and students in both formal and informal learning settings. The project was then formally integrated into the university music curriculum as a credit-bearing class, retaining all of the openness of the original initiative, except for the financial uncertainty.
Students can apply to the International Experience module in their final year of study and the small group on the module then work collaboratively to design their curriculum, planning the details of their trip, from travel logistics to their musical interactions. The environment created is one of co-learning, where students are engaged in heutagogy, the highest levels of autonomous learning. The assessed reflective journal encourages students to detail their learning process and engage with deeper learning. Every cohort is completely different.
The original trip was completely documented, and the entire process was written as an eBook. This includes 10,000 words of student-authored content, and depicts the entire journey in order to serve as a model for other students and educators. The eBook was published without DRM.
