The principle that education should be open and accessible for everyone is one that many people (and educators) share. I mean, if you don’t believe in openness, why are you in education? An extension of David Wiley’s remark, I wish I could roll my eyes digitally the way he did in his talk. Open education is about sharing and being generous. It will increase knowledge in the society, and this is how we will all, collectively, advance.

Teaching and learning is not a one-directed knowledge transfer, it is a continuous process of collecting information from different sources, assessing it, engaging in discussion, and developing our thinking and understanding. So it seems to be a no-brainer that we should use more resources – open educational resources. Then we have more space and time to build on them and construct a more interesting course rather than starting from scratch every time. Using available material and sharing our own can give us the incentive to create a course that offers more than what a set of lecture slides or a book can. It can help us collaborate more and learn more ourselves from others who will contribute.

I think the main barrier to this is confidence. In oneself, that the material is without errors, in the person that will see it, that it will be used in an appropriate way, in the system that will be fair to everyone. Confidence is built in small steps. It can start with sharing something with colleagues, and working together to build on that. Openness is gaining ground in institutions, and it can help everyone develop. And after all, that is what we should be aiming for. In order for our students to learn as best they can, we need to open ourselves, to share our knowledge, and to keep learning. Perhaps sharing material can even have a side effect in keeping everyone on their toes to continue to learn and develop.

The first time I came across open sharing was many years ago, in an interview of one of my favourite composers. He said that he was happy that people would enjoy his music and modify his songs, that the songs were just created by him but they were alive and free to develop. For him this was much better than holding on to them. Not his exact words, but it’s been at least 20 years since then.. It took me many years to fully comprehend it. To realize that if you create something beautiful, useful, interesting, important, why would you want to keep it in a glass cage in confinement rather than let it out so that others can enjoy, be inspired and influenced?

In the engineering and computing world, the best parallel is open source software. Sharing what you constructed is an inspiring thing to do and ensures that its impact will be much bigger. It is like creating a giant collaborative project. More will use it, and a lot more will contribute and improve it, taking more pride in doing so.

Alexander Fleming decided to not patent penicillin, so that it would be accessible to more people who needed it and could benefit from it. Sharing our educational resources will not have such an impact. But it will be a welcome breath of fresh air in the midst of patent wars and paywalls that keep science and engineering research out of reach.

So how do we do it? My first suggestion is to learn more about Creative Commons licences, explained in this beautifully made video. And to remember that we don’t need to start big. We just need to take a step. Learn about open learning. Share lecture material with colleagues. Start a dialogue. Take a course. Spread the knowledge and awareness to others. Then we have set the ball rolling.