Topic 2 had us consider openness in teaching and learning. When and how should we make use of open educational resources in our classrooms?
Our group discussions around this topic took a cost-benefit approach, weighing the pros and cons of “going open” from the viewpoints of different actors, e.g., teachers versus students, or from different interests, e.g., institutional versus commercial.
For learners, the benefit of having increased access to vast amounts of content, coupled with the tangible reduction in the cost of education (we all know very well how frightfully expensive university textbooks can be) was contrasted against the “prejudice that ‘free’ must mean poor quality” (Bates, 2019 chapter 11). This raised a number of questions: With an internet full of information and limited quality control, how do we equip our students to assess the quality and validity of the content they consume? Related, from the perspective of the creators of educational materials, what is the incentive to publish a unique work, if there is no financial reward for high-quality work?
For teachers willing to “go open”, a battle is fought on many fields:
1) Against unrealistic expectations from administrators related to the extra time required to include open educational resources (OER) in their courses and the hours required to maintain the OER resources (uncertainty of responsibility).
2) Against exploitation. While educators may receive constructive feedback from a broader audience and may use this to further develop their materials there is both a fear and a real threat that they might lose the rights to their own work. Coupled with this are concerns that institutions use open online courses that accept many participants and require few teachers as a way to earn / save money: the notion that “higher education is being dismantled in order to monetize that most precious of assets, namely the contents of academics’ head” (Weller, 2014).
3) Against undue criticism. The content you chose to share openly becomes the subject of much more public assessment and criticism.
4) Against the “digital divide”. While the benefits of OER include many freedoms associated with cost and access, there remain certain groups or individuals who are unable to access these materials due to various factors, including individual attitudes/motivation, digital literacy, physical infrastructure/remoteness, accessibility, culture, and societal norms (Lane, 2009).
As we discovered in our PBL group work on this topic – free does not always mean free. In our attempt to create a comic strip to depict the findings of our group’s deliberations on the topic of “openness”, we sought out free software to design our product. To our disappointment, the “free” version of the app we chose had significant limitations in its designs and functionality – e.g., only one group member could work on the comic strip at a time so we were faced with an extra step of task designation. This also meant that we could not collaborate on the product simultaneously. Situations like this can often lead to group dissolution or a lack of motivation to learn collectively – but more on that in my next post.
Bates, A. W. (Tony), ‘Chapter 11: Trends in Open Education’, in Teaching in a Digital Age – Second Edition (Tony Bates Associates Ltd., 2019) <https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/part/10-trends-in-open-education/> [accessed 7 May 2021]
Lane, Andy, ‘The Impact of Openness on Bridging Educational Digital Divides’, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10.5 (2009) <https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v10i5.637>
Weller, Martin, The Battle for Open, Ubiquity Press (Ubiquity Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.5334/bam>
