This topic was a bit strange for me. Mostly because I was travelling, meeting an awful lot of new people and getting a real introduction to the context of my new job for a large part of the topic. This meant that I could not attend the middle two PBL group meetings and also missed both the webinar and the discussion webinar. In the traditional view of learning, this would be considered sub-optimal for getting what might be called the ‘official view’ on the topic, and there has been much argument about the importance of attendance at synchronous sessions, particularly during the past year with media and governments pushing for synchronous meetings and a rapid return to face-to-face teaching while education experts question the necessity of such emphasis on ‘live’ teaching [1].
Openness also includes Open Educational Resources (OERs), and was something that I had encountered before and, if I was not too diligent about reading the suggested readings, I was diligent in contributing to the asynchronous parts as requested. I also had neither the time nor the energy to watch recordings of meetings and webinars. Even contributing to the asynchronous aspects by adding to – and seeing others’ ideas – gave broader perspective and was useful and motivating for developing my own thinking and understanding potentially common concerns and misconceptions free of excessive posturing.
Some of the investigative parts were particularly useful since they provided a reason to find – and understand – relevant university policies, particularly on OERs. It was curious (and worrying) to see the stark dichotomy between how universities (and governments via research councils) demand Open Access publication of research work, but often say almost nothing about the educational side of things [2]. I feel this is symptomatic of the value placed on education efforts in and by universities, and brings me back to a central irony: what is a university without students?? This lack of guidance may be detrimental to encouraging open education practices and sharing since many academics may feel threatened by the lack of guidelines and express permission. Academics have many calls on their time, and it is safer to keep ‘private’ – that is, within the university system – material when well-intentioned sharing may lead to difficulties later if found to be in conflict with a hard to find and unclear university policy [3].
The idea of a naïve all or nothing approach to openness seems pervasive, but this topic has allowed me to consider quite carefully that whenever something is made available as an open educational resource, the motivation for making it available should not simply be ‘because I can’ or ‘because this is (currently non-existent) university policy’. For me, deliberateness is key to meaningful sharing, but this is something that does not seem to be covered even by what might be termed ‘OER champions’ (e.g.: oercommons.org or The Open University (UK)), which often also focus more on full presentations rather than specific items [4]. In our PBL group, this returns us to our favourite question of ‘WHY?’
[1] Čelić, B., & Dedeić, J. SYNCHRONOUS AND ASYNCHRONOUS LEARNING IN ONLINE EDUCATION; http://www.trend.uns.ac.rs/stskup/trend_2021/radovi/T1.3/T1.3-8.pdf
[2] The University of Oslo has clear guidelines and expectations for making research results and data open access, but there is essentially no guidance about course materals: https://www.ub.uio.no/english/writing-publishing/open-access/; https://www.ub.uio.no/english/writing-publishing/open-access/what-is-open-access.html – Accessed 29/10/2021
[3] Henderson, S., & Ostashewski, N. (2018). Barriers, incentives, and benefits of the open educational resources (OER) movement: An exploration into instructor perspectives. First Monday, 23(12). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i12.9172
[4] Producing digital learning materials through the institution, in Norwegian https://delrett.no/nb/artikler/produsere-digitale-l%C3%A6remidler-ved-institusjonen – Accessed 29/10/2021
