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With new media and technology, the possibility to increase our capacity as educators to be open and generous about the knowledge has never been bigger. Openness has so far often referred to sharing teaching material like textbook, courseware offline. However, with the technology at use today we can more effectively reuse, redistribute, revise and remix the material that is produced. In order to accomplish this, we as educators have to have a mindset of being open to sharing. I believe that being an educator is all about sharing and being generous. This means that we need to overcome the initial urge to consider what we produce as “mine”, especially considering that the course work that we produce in Sweden is funded by the taxpayers. Also, the sense of what I produce being mine is really contra-productive if we zoom out and think about our students. Successful educators are the ones sharing their material and their thoughts and feedback with their students. What of course is important, is to recognize the faculty/colleagues/researchers etc. that have produced the material in the first place through for example Creative Commons.

Also, from only being able to share among your colleagues you can now share with an infinite amount of people. This is something completely new and unprecedented. We can share information and knowledge in a way that has never been possible before. With that comes critical thinking. When you “use” shared material from someone you know it is easier to evaluate the credibility of the source than when you “use” material from an unknown faculty member. The same thing for students, when their teacher shares something with them, they have a relationship with that person and can easier assess the credibility of that person compared to material found on YouTube or other sources. Therefore, with the openness, the ability to self-direct becomes crucial (Knox, 2013). Students need to learn how to find the necessary resources and to be critical about what they find. One way to accomplish this in an online setting is to include collaboration and cooperation among the students, together with observation and reflection, as this will contribute to learning, critical thinking and creativity (Hrastinski, 2013:69).

Furthermore, from a pure economical perspective, it is smarter and better to reuse, redistribution, revise and remix than for everyone to “reinvent the wheel”. If there is no sharing, no feedback, engaging in give and take, what is then left? Education in itself is about sharing and openness, and what has happened in the last decades is that we have seen a wave of technology that allows us to share to an unlimited amount of people. Of course, we also need to be aware that the open content depends on the availability of technology, which puts limits to where and who can have access, and we cannot therefore expect learning to take place anywhere and anytime. Same thing with open accessibility, that is, is internet being reliable and do the students have knowledge about how to use it? This has become acutely obvious in the Covid 19 times where students in different countries as social groups have different knowledge and accessibility to the technology and the internet. When we talk about openness and sharing, we therefore need to consider these aspects in order for us to become even better educators.

  • Europaparlementets och rådets rekommendationer om nyckelkompetenser för livslångt lärande (2006), https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2006:394:0010:0018:SV:PDF
  • Hrastinski, S. (2013). Nätbaserad utbildning: en introduktion. (2. uppl.) Lund: Studentlitteratur.
  • Knox. J. (2013) Five critiques of the open educational resources movement, Teaching in Higher Education, 18(8), 821-832, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2013.774354
Sharing and Openness in education – some thoughts