Open education, as a second topic in the course, took me by surprise. Even if the concept was not really new to me and I have very limited experience with actually undertaking any type of open education. Our group soon realized that it was a far more complex topic than what we initially thought. There was so many ways to interpret openness as well as many pedagogical models to follow. For me the easiest way to understand open education is to link it to the concept of open educational practices (OEPs).
OEP is a broad descriptor of practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of open educational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies and open sharing of teaching practices (Cronin, 2017, p. 15).
One thing that put a strong impression on me was how overly positive the concept was presented in the course. We were somehow given the agency as well as the motivation to drive the change towards undertaking different open education initiatives and become more open in different ways. There was surprisingly little about the broader context and the system hinders as well as existing incentives to actually be more open and re-invent the ways we work. If you look at the interpretations of openness, provided by Cronin (2017), you find four different ones: open admission, open as free, open educational resources (OER), and open educational practices (OEP):
- “Open as Free”: Open as access to teaching and educational resources that are available for free, i.e. at no cost to the user. The access to teaching and educational resources are freely available online to anyone interested in and, not insignificantly, able to access them.
- “Open Admission”: Open admission to formal education refers to open-door academic policies; that is, elimination of entry requirements for institution-based learning.
- “Open as open educational resources”: going beyond access to provide the ability to modify and use materials, information and networks so education can be personalized or/and provided to larger and diverse audiences.
- “Open as open educational practices”: moving beyond a content-centred approach, from resources to practices, with learners and teachers sharing the processes of knowledge creation.
Looking at those interpretations of openness I was not surprised to see that the individual agency of the teachers in each of those interpretations is limited to various degrees by the wider context/system/institution. The way Ehlers (2011) defines OEPs is telling:
practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning paths (p. 4).
Therefore, it is not surprising that the level and acceptance of the open education in its various forms is generally low and slow, but on a ongoing trend (Allen & Seaman, 2016). Therefore, it was not surprising that we, in our PBL group, found the topic somehow challenging. I was even somehow skeptical to the idea, finding it in its pure sense rather Utopian.
So why did I felt that way? A logical explanation coming from the field of innovation sciences that I could relate to was the theory of disruptive innovation. This idea that disruptive innovations combine a new technology that has the potential to evolve rapidly, with an innovative business model and displace established ways of doing things (Christensen, 2003). This was it, open education is in fact an emerging disruptive innovation…… The image below from the white paper on MOOCs and open education: Implications for Higher Edcation (Yuan & Powell, 2013) shows an illustration of MOOCs as a disruptive innovation:
So, the key question here is how universities (not solely individuals) respond to this? Typically established organizations are slow to take advantage and/or recognize the thread of disruptive innovations, in that case open education. In our case, established organizations are established universities at large. They usually leave space for new players such as Coursera and Udacity and instead focus on improving their performance and experiment with new forms of online learning at a much slower pace (COVID19 changed that this year). Therefore, it was not surprising that me as a teacher at a established university still had hard time to relate to the ideas of open education without the institutional framework in place to facilitate such efforts and OEPs.
References
Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2016). Opening the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2015-16. Babson Survey Research Group. Retrieved from
http://onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthetextbook2016.pdf
Christensen, C., M. (2003). The innovator’s solution: creating and sustaining successful growth. Harvard Business Press.
Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational
Practices in Higher Education. International Review of Research in Open and
Distributed Learning, 18 (5), 15–34. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3096
Ehlers, U. -D. (2011). Extending the territory: From open educational resources to open educational practices. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 15(2). Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/147891/
Yuan & Powell (2013). White paper on MOOCs and open education: Implications for Higher Edcation. http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2013/667
