Today I aim to reflect on open learning, which lies at the very heart of Open Networked Learning. The keyword here is open – what does open mean in terms of education? According to Catherine Cronin (2017), openness in this context refers to four aspects, namely open admission, free of charge, open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP). The more I have learnt about open education, the more I have come to view it as a diverse terrain of different levels of openness. Ideally, anything branded as open education would involve all four aspects of openness, but in practice this is not always the case. Open admission means that anyone can enrol in courses regardless of educational background and without having passed an entrance exam. Many so-called open universities that offer open admission, offer their courses for a fee and there are often limits to how many courses there are on offer. It is, for instance, not too common to be able to undertake an entire degree programme in this way. For certain professions, this restriction is understandable and justifiable; perhaps we want future doctors to have passed some sort of entrance exam and aptitude process.
Through the course of our PBL group work, I came to connect open learning with OERs and OEPs. I had some previous familiarity with OERs, but I had not considered their full potential before or connected them to OEPs. There are many benefits to using OERs for both teachers and students. Benefits for students include reduced costs and increased access to learning material. Teachers, on the other hand, can save time on not having to create as much content from scratch as they normally would. In addition, OERs have the potential to invite more collaboration between teachers and provide teachers with more opportunities to learn from each other. This brings us to OEPs. I have come to understand OEPs as teaching in a way that invites the learners into the knowledge-creating process. What does this mean in practice? It can mean that you, as a teacher, communicate the structure and the choices underlying the learning situation, for instance, the reasons behind a certain way of working and mode of assessment. Sharing this kind of information forces the teacher to reflect on their methods and evaluate their choices. Inviting the learners into the knowledge-creating process also typically means using and modifying OERs. Firstly, the teacher can decide to partly or exclusively use OERs in their courses; OERs created by them or others. Secondly and more importantly, the teacher can ask students to build upon the OER or participate in the process of making an OER. This way of working has the potential to boost student engagement and agency (Farrell et al., 2021).
While potentially rewarding, this way of working might also prove challenging for students. Unless the teacher curates the resources, it may be challenging to locate and evaluate suitable resources. Furthermore, students accustomed to traditional teaching methods might have trouble adapting to this way of working (Green et al., 2018). Another aspect to consider is the risk of online abuse. Sharing and learning openly should never take place at the expense of the people involved (Cronin, 2017). In conclusion, open learning has lots to offer and I hope to see more of this in the world of education in the future, but as with everything else, we need to reflect on our choices and measure methods against both risks and rewards.
References
Cronin, C. (2017). Open Education, Open Questions. EDUCAUSE Review 52, no. 6 (November/December 2017)
Farrell, O., Breen, E., Brunton, J., Cox, R., Costello, E., Delaney, L., Gallagher, E. & Smyth, V. (2021). Go Open: A beginners Guide to Open Education. Dublin: DCU. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4593103
Green, C., Illowsky, B., Wiley, D., Ernst, D., Young, L., DeRosa, R. & Jhangiani, R. (2018). 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Practices. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/7/7-things-you-should-know-about-open-education-practices (Accessed 2022-04-26)
