Over the last two weeks we’ve worked on open education and the whole concept of openness. At times I’ve felt the more we talked about it, the more difficult it became to define what open education actually means. Maha Bali’s webinar actually really opened my eyes to the social justice point, the global issues when openly distributing material. Up till now, I’ve lived in my own little university bubble when it comes to openness. And that is difficult enough. We have to fight with a lot of bureaucracy when promoting open education at university level. It is still quite a new concept to use and even create open educational ressources. However, the knowledge of teachers and students on the topic and the visibility and availabilty of ressources has been improving during the last years.

To me, openness starts with the working environment for students and teachers. I really like the idea of going back to the coffee house or Penny University Movement. Allowing discussions, promoting interaction between students and teachers and opening the mind to seemingly crazy ideas and solutions. This goes directly together with implementing more inclusive and socially just learning opportunities. In our group we’ve also realised that there is a big overlap with topic one. Digital literacy is a prerequisite for taking part in open education, for locating the ressources and knowing how to assess their quality and use them. So dogital literacy courses are, in my opinion, a definite requirement in promoting participation and open education.

This directly relates to my own journey so far in this course: I felt completely overwhelmed at the beginning by all the tools I was supposed to use, none of which I was really familiar with. Being opposed to register with Google for the last 41 years of my life, I did not have gmail, Twitter, discord or a blog. It felt like I was only busy creating accounts and figuring out websites for the first week. In the meantime I cannot believe how much I’ve started to enjoy the PBL Group Zoom meetings. Having never met before, the group seems to have developed a really easygoing relationship, the meetings are fun, but still efficient and, as one group member said at the last meeting, we always have a finished rewarding product in the end. This is what openness practically means to me at the moment: Being able to work together across continents, sharing knowledge about tools and ressources and improving everyones skills every single week.

Open Learning – Sharing, what does “open” actually mean?