For me, personally, the idea of openness in education has been natural for a long time. Over twenty years ago I started teaching, and the ideas and material that older, more experienced and skilled, teachers shared with me set an example for how things could be done in the classroom, and it was extremely valuable to me. Back then the material was shared in the form of photocopies along with conversations. Later on, as communication on the Internet grew, different lesson idea sites popped up, and now it was not only teachers at the same school that could collaborate, but ideas could come from strangers, and I could adjust the material to fit my context. Today, it is natural for me to share my material in different ways, and I have produced LMS modules (Ekstrand, 2021, Larsson & Ekstrand, 2021) as well as been part of producing a MOOC (Larsson et al, 2020) where we are happy if other teachers at other universities use our material. We have chosen to share our material with a Creative Commons Non-Commercial label.

I think that the aspect of openness that Bali (2021) spoke about in the ONL webinar, about the emotional aspect of openness, was interesting. She underlined how you can feel connected to something that you have produced, and therefore not want people to use it in all different situations, and that this is a valid emotion to be respected. The open material that I have produced, or have been part of producing, is specifically designed to help students improve their academic language, and I am pleased when teachers from other Swedish universities, and even a Finnish university, message me to for example ask for the embed links to some of the videos that I produced as part of this course, as that means that the work I put into producing the material is worth while. I do, however, understand that other kinds of material may feel a lot more sensitive to share. My focus in the texts and videos that I have produced, is all on the students and their understanding, while if I would produce more personal material and share my ideas on certain topics, I understand that it would be upsetting if someone took that and published it as their own. Also, the fact that our knowledge and ideas are actually the only thing that makes us valuable in academia, and the only reason we have our jobs, makes the need to respect people’s intellectual property ever bigger.

My fear is that open educational resources (OER) may not be possible to use due to accessibility demands. I attended a webinar hosted by the Swedish Council for Higher Education (UHR, 2021) where the message was that all OERs need to be accessible in terms of readability and subtitles etcetera to be allowed to be posted in our LMS. They did not seem to take into account that the reason to use OERs may be that the teacher will not be able to produce all kinds of learning materials that will suit all kinds of learners, and that the use of OERs may be the most accessible teaching possible, as the teacher may present an array of resources that the students can choose from, which means that the students struggling with reading may choose to watch a film, and the student with poor hearing may choose a text based resource and so on. This possibility was not discussed at all in the UHR webinar, and I am awaiting further instructions to clarify these aspects.

Another aspect of this is that resources that we could use freely are now debated within my own organisation, as our IT department has opinions on any resource that can find any kind of information about its users, due to the big GDPR fear. This means that the overall sentiment that the Internet is a smorgasbord that we can find our favorite dishes on, may fade and change to a feeling that we need to protect our information at any cost. This is already a transition in progress, as the IT department has forbidden us to use Padlet, which was a much appreciated pedagogical tool that allowed people to share their ideas openly, but now we are struggling with using terrible alternatives, such as MS Whiteboard.

Bali, M. (2021 October 20) Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices [Webinar] ONL https://www.opennetworkedlearning.se/onl212-course-overview/onl212-topic-2-open-learning-sharing-and-openness/onl212-topic-2-event-webinar-sharing-and-openness/

Ekstrand, S. (2021) Academic writing in Sweden [LMS Module]. Canvas. https://lor.instructure.com/resources/8ad74a27085f42a585a09340fe19a9cc?shared

Larsson M., & Ekstrand, S. (2021) Akademiskt skrivande [LMS Module]. Canvas. https://lor.instructure.com/resources/d605db22029e4982a7751d5dc6f491cc?shared

Larsson, M., Ekstrand, S., Nilsson, C. & Johansson, P. (2020) Språka på akademiska [MOOC]. MDH. https://open.mdh.se/courses/spraka-akademiska

Universitets- och Högskolerådet. (2021 September 9) Webbinarium: Tillgänglighet [Webinar] UHR https://www.uhr.se/om-uhr/kalender/2021-kalender/webbinarium-tillganglighet/