As we all know there are several ways of learning. We can read books, watch videos, visit courses, observe someone else doing something, asking someone what we would like to know, investigate in studies or in the internet and so on. And it is interesting that in all ways or let’s say the most ways of learning we profit from one another’s expertise being consciously or unconsciously shared with us. “Education is sharing – there is no education when you don’t share” said David Wiley 2010 in his Ted-Talk about open education and the future. So why are some of us and me included anxious about sharing our knowledge and learning material and protecting it although teaching is in its own sharing?

Barriers to being open

Kiruthika Ragupahti presented during the webinar of Topic 2 in the ONL course this october five barriers to being open:

1. Fear and safety
2. Loss of prestige
3. Perceptions of quality
4. Time / time-consuming
5. Technological expertise

I think I experience all five barriers. Through the confrontation with the question what my opinion is about sharing my expertise for free with others I identified the following barriers to be the strongest ones: the time I would have to invest and the uncertainty about what would happen with the material and the missing technological expertise.

Options for open education

So, I started to investigate for some technical possibilities for open education and I found out that there are already a huge mass of portals and technical possibilities for sharing and of course also to subscribe to courses. And as a take-home message from some interviews Kiruthika Ragupahti published on a podcast “perspectives of openness” for our course with former ONL-Participants I realized that open education can be much more differentiated, it is not only black and white. If I want to try to share more privately, I first can share content with my colleagues or in a blog. Someone also accentuated that People have to be willing to build bridges to one other and this can be beside publishing content or offering a whole course just sharing their time and thoughts through discussion, posts on blogs and create new knowledge in a creative collaborative way of communication. You can find the result of my investigations about different options for open education in the mind map below, which are mostly based on the video for open education by Alastair Creelman and Ragupahti which was published as well for our course this October.

The copyright and systemic aspects about open education

I learned as well that it is very important to declare the rights on every single point I publish in the internet. The elements of creative common license are therefore a very powerful instrument. Alastair Creelman told us in one of the PBL group meetings for this topic: “If you cannot find the original source / author you cannot cite / use it. Make sure everything is correctly cited and used.” That’s why I did create my own pictures for this blog post and I tried to declare the chosen elements of creative common license for the pictures.

The aspect of the rights of the material brings me to another important point to be considered when thinking about share learning material. I must check with my university about the strategy of the university for open education and the rights for content I am producing. I already know that my university is interested in open education and they started this year to publish the first MOOC’s on different platforms. It’s good to know that there would be technical and legal support for sharing educational material. Because getting support from a system is important for the launch of open education. As we are in the age of digitalization, we need something like a red thread. This could be in form of change agents or findings about the sharing economy.

Dealing with fear and time consumption for sharing

It will remain the barrier of time consumption and maybe the fear for bad feedbacks on my material.

Would it be so nasty to get bad feedback? I suppose yes. But I must admit that I didn’t experience bad feedback yet while sharing my content. I published a specialist book in 2013 and the second edition in 2018 and so far, I did get just positive feedback from the reader. So, I could trust in the message Wiley made in his already mentioned Ted-Talk: “expertise is non-rivalrous”. And walking through the fields the other day I saw some horses on a field grazing. This sight showed me how natural it would be to share, and I thought by myself: they share non-rivalrous, communicate with each other and the graze is somehow all for free. So there hasn’t have be fear, I can just dare to intensify to connect and develop the expertise of others and mine as well.

Benefits of open education

Wiley mentioned in his Ted-Talk that open education is an exploding market and it offers a lot of opportunities for learners and teacher. Probable the most important benefit of open education after my investigations is the immense power of possibilities to develop someone’s expertise in all kind of subjects for free. I personally experience in the Open Networked Learning course that I love to be triggered and develop thoughts through collaboration. It inspires me to invest more time and energy in sharing expertise and learning with others than I did so far.

To conclude: I think it makes sense to not only think where to share but also to whom to share and what to share and to connect to others for supporting each other in this transformation towards a digital and sharing economy.

What are your thoughts about open education?

I would appreciate to discuss your experiences and ideas about open education. Do you already have experiences with open education? How did you deal with your barriers? Where do you see the potential for yourself in open education? I am curious to step directly into the melting pot of sharing and learning from each other.

Literature:

Creelman, A. Ragupahti, K. 2020: What is open education? Video. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/openeducation/video/ (accessed at 31.10.2020)

Ragupahti, K. 2020. Perspectives of openness. Podcast. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/openeducation/audio-podcast/ (accessed at 31.10.2020)

Wiley. David 2010: Open Education. Ted-Talk. https://ed.ted.com/on/9VDOJjpJ (accessed at 31.10.2020)

WordPress. 2020. creative commons. Team Switzerland. http://www.creativecommons.ch/ (accessed at 31.10.2020)