After two weeks of discussing openness in education in our PBL group and reading available resources on the ONL site, I was amazed by the possibilities – not only for my teaching, but also for my own learning possibilities (obviously also affecting my teaching). These weeks also provided a space to reflect over my own view of openness in education and gave many new perspectives over how it can be interpreted.
First, a few definitions (according to Open Education Global):
Open Educational Resources (OER): Resources whose creators have enabled no-cost reuse through the use of open licenses, i.e. free to use, share or adapt.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Courses that have free access through the web. Usually free to audit, but if you are interested in getting a certificate, it can be at a cost.
Open Access (OA): Research open to read without subscriptions or pay-per-view barriers.
Open Educational Practices (OEP): Practices that support the use of Open educational resources (OER), by promoting pedagogical models and policies of openness.
So, what are my thoughts on what openness in education means?
As I see it, openness in education is not only about the resources available, but a flexibility for the learner to choose in which way, and what they need to be able to extract the desired knowledge. I also see openness as related to progress, connectivity and inclusion. With openness in education the progress of knowledge can re-energize and the reuse of OER materials has the potential to result in new open education practices (Pulker and Kukulska-Hulme 2020). Without openness in education, there is a risk for important knowledge to be limited to a small group of individuals, the privileged ones (Bali, Cronin & Jhangiani, 2020).
Bali and Koseoglu (2016) focus on connections and communities, when referring to openness in education and prefer the term “open self” (instead of OER). I appreciate this perspective, since it personalizes the educational aspects of the field and emphasizes that people are editable. When I teach, I sometimes question models that put people in certain molds (i.e. DISC, MBTI etc.), because these models tend to forget that human beings have the possibility to change. For me, to take on pedagogical methods, means that I believe in my students’ potential to deepen their knowledge and their ability to develop. Therefore, I agree with Bali and Koseoglu (2016), as they refer to individuals as editable.
For my own lifelong learning, I have benefited from understanding how much MOOCs there are in my field of research and reflecting over my own view of openness. I hope that I can get the support and encouragement from my institution to share my new insights and that this could affect the institutions pedagogical approaches.
References / “read more here”:
Bali, M, Cronin, C and Jhangiani, RS. 2020. Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1): 10, pp. 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565
Bali, M and Koseoglu, S. 26 August 2016. Self as OER. The Chronicle of Higher Education ProfHacker [online]. Available from: https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ profhacker/self-as-oer-selfoer/62679.
Lambert, SR. 2018. Changing our (dis)course: A distinctive social justice aligned definition of open education. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3). Available from: https://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/ view/290/334.
Open Education Global: What We Do – OEGlobal
Pulker, H., & Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2020). Openness re-examined: teachers’ practices with open educa- tional resources in online language teaching. Distance Education, 41(2), 216–229.
