These weeks’
topic is openness. With this one, I have struggled a bit to get into it. The
materials did not seem too appealing to me at first and in the webinar I had
difficulties to really get involved. My initial impression was “Openness? Sure,
it’s a good thing. You should be open. What is there to discuss for two weeks, really?”.

However, my
PBL group has pulled of a great discussion and promoted my interest. Our meetings
taught me, there is a lot to think about and discuss! Our focusses were on
fears regarding opening your teaching (material), barriers for opening your resources,
benefits of openness and finally social justice aspects of OER.

Personally,
I don’t think I am too hesitant to share my materials and I would say ‘fear’ is
not the best term to apply here. I also consider myself ‘open’ and not dominated
by fears, in general. However, I have hardly shared any material so far. The
institutions I have worked at also usually promoted publishing your material on
the intranet only. This has even commonly been restricted to the very class the
material is designated for. And even then, if you use an illustration from a
book, for example, there has been a big debate if this is ok and if you can
then make it available to the students at all. I am convinced that education
should not be exclusive. So, restricting access to information and teaching
material is really counterintuitive to me. Nevertheless, fears of legal issues
regarding copyrights have implicitly also kept me from going more open probably.
I think, the creative commons licenses are a good way to overcome this issue.
It has been helpful for me to learn more about the different types of licenses
and I am pleased to recognize more and more publications are also open access
and have a CC license. If I prepare material now, I make sure to give the correct
references for each source I use and this way would feel secure to ‘go open’
with the material. Nonetheless, will I get institutional support for this idea?
– Likely not without major efforts on my side.

Somewhat along
the same lines, as long as traditionally and institutionally education is
promoted as something exclusive, openness will only slowly become a more
popular concept, I believe. It seems, Germany is much more conservative in this
regard than Scandinavian countries, for example. *sigh*

Our group
discussion about the social justice aspect of OER has further made me wonder if
the conservative habit of keeping education exclusive in Germany also adds to
the attitude towards OER. In the PBL group, we discussed fundamental aspects
like internet access and whether it is really fair to make even more resources
available to people with access while others are still completely without access.

On a
side note, it is quite ironic that my own internet access has been quite
limited in the last week just due to traveling a lot in Germany and
Switzerland. If it is only temporary though, it is an opportunity for
reflection and hardly appears as a limitation to me.

But even if you disregard fundamental issues of
technical barriers, access to (open) education does not seem to be fair for
many reasons, digital literacy opportunities being only one of them. – Back to
the social justice aspect here. As long as we stick with the idea, that
exclusiveness of education is a value itself, which is mandatory for quality,
openness will be majorly impaired. However, is an education really better just
because we keep it restricted to a limited group, which we define eligible by
(arbitrary?) criteria selected by the very privileged group who has had access
to that education before? In turn, would this education be worse or less
valuable if we opened it for broader access? Of course, it is not that simple
as some resources like tutoring or practical courses are really limited. Nonetheless,
this seems to be used as an easy excuse to keep other resources exclusive, too.