As Topic 2 “Open learning – Sharing and Openness” comes to an end I remain with a certain feeling of dissatisfaction. Per se, this is not a bad thing when you are the student in a course. It might indicate that you got hungry for more knowledge. And indeed, I feel we haven’t covered the topic from enough angles.
In “The Battle for Open” Weller suggest refraining from defining “open education” because it would be difficult to capture the manifold inter-related aspects.[i] While this is certainly true, the lack of a definition can result in a one-sided discussion. To me it seemed that a big part of the discussion within the ONL202 community was centered around “free education accessible to everyone” rather than opening up teaching and learning. With ONL202 being a community of teachers it came with little surprise that the general consensus was that education should be accessible to everyone. The list of advantages for being open in education and provide access to learning is long (and convincing) and so it was somewhat understandable that the discussions focused mostly on those aspects. But in my opinion a critical look at the challenges and pitfalls of open learning would have been more beneficial to advance this topic both in a general and personal context. In his TED talk, Professor David Wiley passionately portraited the advantages of open learning. But I felt that he approached the subject rather one-sided and did not elaborate on the pitfalls of going open. Maybe one reason for this is that in 2010, when this talk was recorded, open learning was still an emerging concept and it made sense to promote it. Meanwhile most teacher are at least to some extent familiar with open learning, even if they have never incorporated it in their own teaching – like me. And at least personally I have not met many people who would strongly oppose of open learning. The hurdles that keep them from doing so are often just practical issues: How can I do it? Where do I find the resources? Will my host institute support this?[ii]
Coming back to Wiley’s talk 10 years ago – in this last decade “the internet” and the possibilities that it offers have shown also their ugly face. The spread of misinformation, bubbles, alternative facts have changed the world. So how can we guarantee that open education stays impartial and neutral? This has been recognized as challenge and several approaches to measure the quality of online courses have been suggested (nicely summarized by Lowenthal and Hodges[iii]). Universities will have to play an even stronger role in this respect. Any educational institute that offers or utilizes open courses will have to check the quality and integrity, agree on ways of assessment, and incorporate them into existing or new curricula. Alastair Creelman referred to this as “the context”. This means if someone wants to receive a validated certificate or even a degree a university affiliation is still needed. So I feel in order to truly benefit from the entire spectrum of open learning structural changes in our educational system are needed. We (teachers) will have to play a role in this change. As do university managements, governments, and – of course – students.
[i] Weller, M 2014 The Battle For Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bam
[ii] Nascimbeni, F and Burgos, D 2016 In Search for the Open Educator: Proposal of a Definition and a Framework to Increase Openness Adoption Among University Educators. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning Volume 17, Number 6
[iii] Lowenthal, P and Hodges, C 2015. In Search of Quality: Using Quality Matters to Analyze the Quality of Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs). International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning Volume 16, Number 5
