Openness is a noble word. This topic is indeed very actual not least due to the two years Covid-19 isolation. This is a very complex topic, we seem to relate to it through our own (cultural background) lenses. What are the motivators of being open? What about the quality of open education? These are matters that pop into my mind when reading Cronin (2017). I think that the motivators are obvious, social justice, everybody benefits from openness. According to Bali (2022) social justice and be seen from many perspectives; economic, cultural or political. It all begins with the institution’s ideology which should be open. We at Arcada UAS discuss openness a lot and encourage to make sure most of our publications are open access and we also offer “free” courses to students in Finland. But to be able to reach out even to a totally open education we still have a lot of challenges. Dr. Bali discussed the openness very well in her webinar. “Knowledge is like water and air” (Taha Hussein 1950) and open education should be like water (Bali 2022). So indeed being open is important but how would we do it in practice following the institutional rules and requirements is the complex questions which cannot be answered in this blog.

The Coffee House article by Ragupathi (2020) gave me a great historical view to the open learning. I am thinking that these types non structured discussions are good models even in today´s education. Many great ideas go back to these informal types of coffee breaks that many institutions have.

 MOOCs are obviously discussed a lot even in my institution and there are many teachers who feel that somehow educational technologies  are replacing direct teacher-student interaction and partly also student-student interaction (social aspect) when only being online. Students might not learn to know each others. Teaching  the  distance learners  also requires  different  skills  not only to prepare  relevant  learning materials to facilitate the  construction  of  knowledge  and learning. The pedagogical approach being in a key role. Teachers do need more competencies in open sharing and handling big groups of students in these MOOC types of set ups.

I think one of the biggest skills is to know how to find resources and navigate through the “paid” versions vs the free versions. Also vetting online resources is a whole skill set in and of itself. We often just tell our students like “you can take a course on Coursera or somewhere else about that” – but never show students what that looks like or how to search through them. We expect them to know but it´s not always the case.

There are many advantages in open education; fast circulation of information, less expensive (not always the case though), can be taken anywhere in the world, equality, less injustice (Bali 2022, Hodgkinson-Williams & Arinto 2017). But there are also disadvantages such as cultural barriers that can lead to misunderstandings, quality issues (who is responsible for the overall quality) or intellectual property (copyright) concerns. These are difficult challenges to solve.

Sources:

Bali, M., Cronin, C. and Jhangiani, R.S., 2020. Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), p.10. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565

Bali M. (2022) Webinar 20.3.2022, https://www.opennetworkedlearning.se/onl221-course-overview/onl221-topic-2-open-learning-sharing-and-openness/onl221-topic-2-event-webinar-sharing-and-openness/

Cronin, C. (2017). Open Education, Open Questions. EDUCAUSE Review 52, no. 6 (November/December 2017) https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/10/open-education-open-questions

Hodgkinson-Williams, C. Arinto, P. (editors) 2017. Adoption and impact of OERs in the global south. African Minds https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/29431

Oddone, K. (2016). PLE or PLN or LMS or OLN? 

Ragupathi, K. (2020). Being open: drawing parallels with the Coffee House model. https://kiruthikaragu.wordpress.com/2020/01/05/being-open/

#ONL221 Topic2 Sharing and Openness