Education in current context can be redefined as sharing knowledge among enthusiastic, potential learners. Being open in educational materials and creating access for everyone has become a huge debate in current academia. Can we make everything open when it comes to education? This question needs to be answered in many ways. “Openness” cannot be created overnight, and it involves a complicated process and many pros and cons. It is undoubtedly true openness could expand the learning spectrum of enthusiastic learners. “openness” can be identified as a new paradigm in teaching and learning. But this process needs the involvement of many stakeholders. Institutional policies, quality of the material, and funding agencies are playing a vital role in this process.  Universities are maintaining their own policies on sharing information. Most of the universities are maintaining a closed policy for their teaching and learning materials and those were open only for the particular domains. 

Hill (1975) has defined the openness in education under three segments.

  • Procedural Openness 
  • Normative Openness 
  • Revolutionary openness 

Procedural openness deals with technical and administrative aspects related to academia. Opening the attendance summery of someone to the entire class is a matter deals with procedural openness. However, openness in academic materials needs to have a control from one point. When it comes to a situation, where any one could publish and any one could access, there can be increased number of issues related to academic integrity. Misuse of materials, unethical usage, plagiarism could be evident than previous. So, the concept “Openness” needs a controlling mechanism to protect academic materials from unethical usage. 

Furthermore, in current situation, some researches and academic documents are only open for that particular research community, but not for all. As an example, most of the medical researches and experiments will be open up only for the researchers who are registered under those research communities. This automatically creates a control on research materials. In some situations, having closed policies on certain research materials will be benefited than opening them to everyone. 

References

Hill, B. V. (1975). What’s open about open education? In D.Nyberg (Ed.), The philosophy of open education (pp. 3–13). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Topic 2 – Openness in Education