Open education represents the creation, use, and sharing of educational material, but also the reuse of this same open material by peers. It means that as a teacher I can bring openness to my practice by accessing to new teaching material and new ways of teaching, and I can bring openness to my students through their learning. Openness is about sharing, opening a door and creating new opportunities both to me and my students.

Openness – why do I feel I am lacking behind?

My first reaction last week was that I did fear openness. I was not sharing my teaching slides online because I was worried my peers would see them, and criticize the product of long hours of hard work. But I had my peers joining those lectures, which slides I am hiding now in my computer! Nobody said anything! Nobody said I was wrong or leading my students the wrong way? Why? Well maybe just because I am simply doing a good job. I might not know the whole extend of my research field, but really who does? And what if someone were to criticize my teaching material. Am I not used to receiving criticism already? I have published 30papers, and I don’t even remember hiding after the first round of review on my first manuscript (and yes! it had been rejected!). I now take the critics on my manuscripts more like comments that help me improve and publish a better research article. So shouldn’t it be the same for my teaching material? It should! Thus, ONL succeeded! I have decided to find a way to share my teaching material; maybe simply by sharing my power-point presentations on my webpage (www.anneduplouy.net) in the future…

Open education carries a strong positive connotation. As presented in the Figure 1 below (Cronin 2017) and also discussed in the webinars of the ONL course this last weeks, openness is about sharing knowledge using new teaching methods, valuing social learning without geographical boundaries and across cultural differences, and developing (digital) literacies by challenging traditional teaching through the use of digital tools. It all sounds great and should appeal to teachers, but reality is that open education is not easy, especially when you are new to it!

There are of course different degrees of openness, and each of us will be comfortable with opening at different degrees with different materials. There is no reason why we should not be flexible, and know when to be open or closed. There are also times for sharing and times for not sharing. Anybody working for example with sensitive material might not support or be allowed to open everything to the world (e.g. working on highly virulent diseases, with patients information…).

Lack of recognition

Openness also means there will most likely be no money coming out of the material shared. Although, maybe by placing the material on one of those blogs, it could still be possible to make some kind of money out of all the adds that will ‘decorate’ the blog pages. Teaching is anyway probably not the profession to target if the final goal is to become billionaire, right? But teachers still want and need some kind of recognition. After all teaching is time consuming: much time is spent thinking and re-thinking, reading, implementing exercises, and creating, preparing and editing the slides that will support the teaching and hopefully the learning process, whether the material is digital or use digital tools or not. Institutions such as Universities do value the traditional ways of teaching, with students facing forward. They also support the development of more interactive curricula, courses combining lectures with hands-on exercises, aiming at promoting the learning experience of the students. Universities will compete for the best teachers/lecturers, in the hope to attract more students. Thus teachers willing and able to develop open access courses would be highly competitive

Furthermore, the European Union is pushing the European countries towards developing Online Teaching Material, open at the global scale! UNESCO praises such initiative and provides guidance for whoever is interested (UNESCO practice book – Inamorato dos Santos et al. (2016) Opening up Education: A support framework for higher institutions). Then, why is there such a lack of recognition of online teaching and online learning at the Universities? Or why do we never hear about those courses already available in our own institutions? Why so few institutions offer online courses for which participating students can earn credits? Why so few institutions have the personnel to support teachers willing to develop Online teaching? Are we still simply at the beginning of the development of Online Teaching, and only time will show whether it will become more common? Is it really up to me right now to take the lead? I would love to, but again do you have the time and energy? I am not a lecturer, I am on a contract under which 100% of time should be focusing on research. Maybe the best tip I should follow is to jumping on the opportunity to join an Online course already organized and well-established, learn from it and later develop my own based on my own experience.

Coggle:

We discussed the topic of openness in our group using the Coggle platform. I suggested it because I saw the output from another group last month and I thought it was visually pleasing. It is very colorful and I can see this digital tool being very useful in some contexts. I can see myself suggesting it to my students who have some group work to do on different topics, a bit like we did in the PBL groups, but the tool is not the easiest to get familiar with. It does take a little time to be comfortable with it and the different options on how to get the different arrows here or there. Additionally some of the options are only available if you register and pay for an account, so not fully Open.

As I go through the weeks with the ONL community, I keep learning, and I keep being reminded that I still have more to learn.

I write too much, right?