I will here more or less associatively bounce ideas about open learning back and forth, especially when it comes to advantages, and to some part disadvantages. I am myself some wary with the notion, although I on the whole do support it and think that, if used correctly, it can be very progressive.
First of all, we need to ask ourselves what open learning is? The term “sharing” is thrown around a lot, but what does that mean? Of course, education always means sharing to some degree. Wiley (2021, 2:45) goes as far as claiming openness is the only means of education. Here we can easily agree that education means sharing between two or more people, but there are risks in watering down the terms if thrown around this way. Openness, I think, should not be used about all education, as that would mean “open learning” would lose its meaning.
“Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide”, it says on the Open Education Consortium webpage (OEC). It adds, that it is combined “with 21st century technology”. The key term here is “open sharing”, meaning that sharing within a closed group is not open learning. “[O]pen allows not just access, but the ability to modify and use materials, information and networks so education can be personalized to individual users or woven together in new ways for large and diverse audiences”, says the OEC webpage.
“Knowledge is meant to be shared, not stored away and hidden from others”, says Rachel Plews in Kiruthika Ragupathi’s podcast Perspectives of Openness (Ragupathi 2021, 2:50). Plews argues that sharing knowledge, does not diminish the value of formal education, as a university education is much more than only the resources (Ragupathi 2021, 3:15). I believe this is true and free, open material might even support formal learning – open courses could work as a “teaser” for the university in question, as we envisioned in our PBL group. There is a Finnish proverb saying that the hunger grows while you eat. In this context, this would mean that when you study something, you are more probable to become prone to learning more about the subject in question. So, letting “the public”, so to say, study something openly and for free, might get more people interested in getting a formal education in that subject.
In the same podcast I mentioned above, Susanne Koch mentions that sharing also supports collegiality (Ragupathi 2021, 6:00) – so openness is not only about the relationship between teacher and students, but also between different teachers.
That is also one thing that many have mentioned as a risk with openness. “What if someone takes credit for all the work I have done?” or “I have put down a lot of time on this, why would I agree to someone else using it?” Partly this can be avoided with Creative Commons licenses, but I will not go into that topic any further here.
Another question we could ask ourselves is what our relation to knowledge is. Is it okay for us to “store it away and hide it”? Do we own knowledge? David Wiley says, jokingly, that openness is about “overcoming the inner two-year-old that screams ‘mine, mine!’” (Wiley 2010, 1:20). From a philosophical point of view, someone might say that it is our duty to bring the knowledge out to as many people as possible. “Sharing what you know and what you can to as many people as possible creates a culture of learning”, says Johanni Larianko in Ragupathi’s podcast (Ragupathi 2021, 11:20). Larianko goes on to say “If knowledge is power, then that knowledge should be distributed as widely as possible” (Ragupathi 2021, 11:35). In this light, we could see openness as a democratic tool for creating an even more equal world.
Ragupathi, Kiruthika 2021. Perspectives of Openness [podcast]. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/openeducation/audio-podcast/ (Available 2021/03/23)
Wiley, David 2010. Open education and the future . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M (available 2021/03/23)
Open Education Consortium. About the Open Education Consortium [webpage]. https://www.oeconsortium.org/about-oec/ (Available 2021/03/25)
