There are two types of governments; one is dictatorship, and another is democratic.
There are two sets of people in expressing the views; one is introvert, and another is extrovert.
There are two methods of operating systems; one is closed, and another is open-sourced.
There are two types of software; one is proprietary, and another is open-sourced.
There are two types of journals; one is closed-access, and another is open-access.
And, there are two types of education; one is closed, and another is open-sourced.

Psychologically, there are two ways of environments as we can perceive in day-to-day life; being closed to express their views and being open to express. It is fundamentally existing phenomenon embedded in human nature. And that comes to the rhetorical question; which one to choose?

And this fundamental question arises also in education arena. In the past, there are some prestigious institutions who has access to journals can publish scientific work and come up with innovations in engineering and technology. Since, only few people have access to these innovations, their extend of reach is limited and those applications took several ages to reach to the common public. That hinders the growth of sharing in information and knowledge. In addition, due to increase in political tensions among governments during World wars, they were increasingly concerned to share their inventions (Krige, 2016).

After completion of World wars, people started realizing that it is essential to collaborate with other countries and make World peace by preventing the future prospective of wars. Hence, several organizations were formed at the top government level that can collaborate in all prospects to improve the awareness of data, information and knowledge. This did open-up some various prospects in all core disciplines in research, education, development and innovation (Almirall and Casadesus-Masanell, 2010).

Several education institutions were formed during last decades so that several students could able to join these institutions to bring new discoveries and inventions to benefit for the growth of the community. Due to the emergence of digital technologies, there is a paradigm change in the way we communicate the world has been changed (Chesbrough, 2006). People are adopting the new streams in all fields of art, science and education and adapting to make new products and services to benefit customers, industries, society and government.

However, not many people in other parts of World can’t able to afford the usage of these technologies and because of severe competition, not many studies are not able to get admission to these students. This closed approach became barriers of the knowledge. Thanks to the developer of Internet is being open, they started gaining knowledge from internet and developing the small-scale products and services. This process originates in the development of open-source ecosystem such as Unix, Linux, etc., where people from around started developing components of operating system to become competitive to the proprietary operating systems such as Apple OS and Microsoft Windows (Bretthauer, 2001).

People choose to jump into these two different oceans, becoming more competitive and building several tools and technologies that lead to increase in accessibility, connectivity, awareness, new innovations and developments. These ecosystems also make a way for developing new software both open and closed environments and make these tools used in day-to-day life. Due to affordability in functionality of similar software in both eco-systems, people choose most of the software in open domain, get leverage and build new components where everyone can benefit (Anderson, 2005). By adopting and learning of these digital technologies, people become aware of digital literacies (Ng, 2012).

As other disciplines are adopting these developed tools and technologies from digital arena, there is tremendous change in terms of leaps and bounds in research and education. To increase competition, need for admitting the high-quality students, improve the accessibility, the top universities started opening open course-ware such as MIT, Stanford, Cornell universities, etc. It gained traction among public to attend these online courses and increased their chances of admissions into other institutions. Due to various challenges in getting authentication, certification and assessment, there is scope for innovation of development of Open Educational Resources and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) (Moe, 2015).

It comes to the dilemma about other educational institutions and teachers about whether they want to “Open” their courses to within their organization or to the entire world. How much should we open the course content? What are the issues and challenges of MOOC? How to convince the institution? These questions will be answered in the part of Open Networked Learning, 201 within the concept of Problem Based Learning. The scenario of the Topic 2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness is

“I’m interested in opening up some of my courses and sharing the resources in a responsible way, but I don’t really know where to start. What options are there for offering courses that are open? How do I get support from my colleagues and how do I introduce the idea to my students? What are the opportunities and dangers of “going open”?”

To solve this issue, as most of the people in education arena facing the above dilemma, as a part of the course, we as a group discussed and provided Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats, SWOT analysis to guide them to consider several other factors to make choice based on social, economic, political, etc.. This blog is part of reflection on advantages and disadvantages of open and closed technologies within education.  

The following spreadsheet has accumulated from literature review to give a kind of decision support analysis for institution, teachers and students for assessing the present strengths and weakness and future prospects of opportunities and threats to proceed forward for MOOC.   

References
Almirall, E. and Casadesus-Masanell, R., 2010. Open versus closed innovation: A model of discovery and divergence. Academy of management review, 35(1), pp.27-47.
Anderson, R., 2005. Open and Closed Systems are Equivalent (that is, in an ideal world). Perspectives on free and open source software, 127, p.142.
Bretthauer, D., 2001. Open source software: A history.
Chesbrough, H., 2006. Open innovation: a new paradigm for understanding industrial innovation. Open innovation: Researching a new paradigm, 400, pp.0-19.
Krige, J., 2016. Sharing knowledge, shaping Europe: US technological collaboration and nonproliferation. MIT Press.
Moe, R., 2015. The brief & expansive history (and future) of the MOOC: Why two divergent models share the same name. Current issues in emerging elearning, 2(1), p.2.
Ng, W., 2012. Can we teach digital natives digital literacy?. Computers & education, 59(3), pp.1065-1078.