I am clearly in favour of a completely
open education. Open access to literature, open educational resources, no
tuition fees, open educational practice, open pedagogics and completely
inclusive to all learners irrespective of their functional diversity or
socio-economic status. Yes, I know that this is impossible, but that is my
dream.

I am not that open myself, yet. I have
not shared the educational resources I produced. I still keep my video lectures
locked up, so that only my students can watch them. Why? Poorly produced on the
spare time I don’t have. Just my voice over a boring Powerpoint presentation.
This is one of the excuses that teachers refer to, when asked why they don’t
share their material. Glenda Cox found 30 different reasons against openness,
when she looked in the literature (Cox,
2013). There was a lot of issues connected to time and resources, quite a
bit on copyright issues both as producer and as consumer of open material.
Another area of concern was the quality of the material, again both as producer
and as consumer. What’s in it for me is, are an important issue as well. With
ever decreasing time for teaching and very limited credits for supporting
students learning it is hard to see the benefits of putting the extra effort
into publishing your material on an OER.

A new obstacle for openness is the GDPR in Europe. Not that
it prevents openness, but most teachers are afraid of making mistakes. Can I be
sure that I did not miss to remove data that should be closed? This is an extra
dimension to the reasons in the literature about copyright issues.

I have,
however, used open resources in my teaching. Early on (20 years ago) I started
using open data to let the students use real and authentic data that are
relevant to their study and work after the education. Over the years more and
more relevant data have become available openly, which have made my work easier.
In recent year I have been using more and more video clips, mainly from Youtube.
 Before one learning activity I demanded that
the students looked at video clip from Youtube (a total of 40 min) and I also
suggested that they might look at a NOVA documentary
that was almost 2 h, about half of the student group look at that as well. That
was a real surprise to me, a pleasant one. I can use open resources to support
student learning.

There are concern
about the sustainability of open resources (Bates,
2019 p 982). I have encountered the problem of unstainable commercial
educational resources, when the publisher decides to take down a resource forcing
me to rethink the learning activity.

However, I
have taken the first small steps towards openness, publishing some minor learning
activities internally at my university. I will continue to explore the possibility
to go further, so that I do my bit to fulfil the dream.