Isabel Duarte

I have been creating and sharing open tools, teaching materials, and reproducible workflows for years. For me, openness is not a strategic choice. It is simply how I work. I put my teaching materials online, I use open-source tools, I contribute to open-source projects. This is an extension of who I am as a computational biologist and educator.

My GitHub account with my Open teaching materials [https://github.com/instructr].

So when my PBL group raised concerns about the risks of openness, about being taken advantage of, about others profiting from your work, about losing recognition, I found myself genuinely surprised. Not because these concerns are invalid (they are innate, natural, human), but because I had never framed openness in terms of what I might lose.

The Concerns

My colleagues articulated several worries that I feel many educators share:

What if someone takes my materials and claims them as their own?
What if a company profits from work I gave away freely?
What if I never get credited for something I spent months creating?
Is it not a form of “stealing” when someone uses open content without contributing back?

These are real anxieties, and I do not want to dismiss them. But I think they rest on assumptions worth examining.

A Different Framing

When I share my teaching materials openly, I am not giving something away. I am putting something into the world that did not exist before. The work is already done; the only question is how many people benefit from it.

If a colleague in Nairobi or in Rio de Janeiro uses my reproducible analysis tutorial to teach their students, I have not lost anything. My slides are still mine. My understanding is still mine. What has changed is that knowledge has travelled further than I could have carried it alone.

The fear of “inappropriate appropriation” assumes a zero-sum game: if someone else gains, I must have lost. But knowledge does not work that way. Teaching materials are not a finite resource that depletes when shared.

On Recognition

Will everyone who uses my materials cite me? No. Does that bother me? Honestly, not much.

Recognition is pleasant, but it is not why I teach. I teach because I want people to analyse data well, to think reproducibly, to build on solid foundations. If my materials help someone do that (even if they never know my name), the goal is achieved.

There is also a practical point: the people most likely to use and adapt open materials are often those with the fewest resources. Demanding formal recognition from every user would create barriers that defeat my purpose for sharing in the first place.

On Being “Taken Advantage Of“

This framing troubles me because it implies that generosity requires reciprocity to be valid. But I did not share my materials as part of a transaction. I shared them because I believe open science makes research better, and because hoarding knowledge feels contrary to what education should be.

If someone uses my work to build something I never imagined, even commercially, that is not theft. That is exactly what open licensing permits. The Creative Commons licence I choose is not a loophole being exploited; it is a deliberate invitation. Copyleft instead of copyright!

Could someone act in bad faith? Certainly. But designing my practice around the worst possible actor seems like a less joyful way to live.

The Real Risk

I would argue the greater risk is not openness but closure. When we keep our materials locked away: we duplicate effort across institutions; we slow the spread of good pedagogical ideas; we make teaching quality dependent on local resources; and we exclude those who cannot afford proprietary alternatives.

The cost of not sharing is invisible but real. It is measured in students who never encountered a clear explanation, in researchers who reinvented methods that already existed, in communities that remained disconnected from knowledge that could have helped them.

Open educational materials democratize access to knowledge. They contribute, however slightly, to making learning a bit more equitable.

Conclusion

I understand the fear of vulnerability that openness brings. Putting your work out there means accepting that you cannot control what happens to it. That feels uncomfortable.

But I keep returning to a simple question: What kind of academic culture do I want to help build? One where we guard our materials tightly, or one where we trust that most people will use shared knowledge in good faith?

I choose the latter. Not because I am naive about the risks, but because the alternative, a closed, suspicious, transactional approach to knowledge, seems far more costly in the end.

What my learning journey looks like outside of myself. (Isabel Duarte | CC BY-SA)

I joined this course for a reason that took me a while to realize: I have been learning my entire life (across disciplines and languages and tools and ideas). But somewhere along the way I realized that no one had ever taught me how to learn. I had been doing it all along, the way one breathes: automatically, unconsciously, without ever stopping to examine the mechanism. ONL felt like a chance to finally look at the mechanism.

There is a quote attributed to Socrates that has stayed with me:

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”

It sounds gentle until you pause to examine it and feel its full weight: no matter how brilliant the teacher, no matter how generous the explanation, no matter how carefully the content is sequenced and delivered, the actual transfer cannot happen. The knowledge does not travel. What travels is a signal, and the receiver must reconstruct the meaning from scratch, using their own biology. We learn through our senses. We integrate knowledge in our own brains, filtered through our own world view, shaped by our individual histories, strengths and blind spots. We are, in a very real sense, locked inside these genetic bodies, and those bodies are the hardware where the software of knowledge must run. The software cannot install itself. It must be compiled locally, every time, for each person.
Now, I have always experienced learning as loneliness, a solitary journey. You could travel alongside others, you can compare notes, but the walking was always done alone, inside your my own brain, in silence.

Then came my first PBL session in this course, and something changed.
It was not a dramatic shift. Nobody said anything that fundamentally changed a belief I had. But I noticed that the perspectives my group members brought were not simply different versions of the same thought I had been having. They were structurally different. They came from different vantage points, different professional backgrounds, different relationships to vulnerability and to the act of sharing: sharing insecurities versus sharing information versus sharing knowledge, for example. And from where they were standing, they could see things I could not see from where I was.
My learning was still individual. The ideas still had to be processed inside my own head. But the inputs had changed in quality, not just quantity. The group had given me new data that I would never have generated alone, not because I lacked the skills, but because I lacked their position in the world. And that distinction matters enormously beacuse i started to feel (and the word feel is key here) that learning is still individual, but individual does not have to mean solitary.

My focus kept returning to the name of the course: Open Network Learning. All three words important, but the first one kept buzzing in my head.
To participate fully in something like this, i.e. to genuinely benefit from the kind of collaborative learning that PBL enables, you cannot simply be connected to others. You must be open to them. And openness is not a passive state. It is an active, sometimes uncomfortable, practice.
When someone in my group offered a perspective that challenged something I believed, the easy response would have been to quietly nod, save it under “interesting but wrong,” and continue. The harder response (the one that ONL seems to be specifically designed to encourage) is to hold that challenge seriously. To let it in. To ask honestly whether my belief is actually well-founded, or whether it is a comfortable assumption I have carried for so long that I have mistaken it for knowledge.
That is where the pain comes in. Not the dramatic pain of being attacked or embarrassed, but the quiet, low-grade discomfort of having a familiar framework slightly destabilised. It takes maturity (perhaps?) to distinguish between feeling challenged and truly being threatened. It takes real confidence to expose your actual thought process to others: not the polished final result, but the messy, draft, half-formed reasoning, and still remain calm and collected while they respond to it.

And then it hit me, somewhere in the middle of reflecting on this: Learning is teaching oneself. I know it sounds circular, but bear with me, be open to my perspective.
When I genuinely learn something (not just memorize a new fact, but actually restructure my understanding), what is happening biologically is that my neural network is being modified. New connections are forming between previously disconnected nodes. Existing connections are being strengthened, or weakened, or sometimes cut and rebuilt in a different configuration. The rewiring is the learning. And nobody else can do this rewiring for me. The teacher can present the stimulus. The conversation can provoke the insight. The PBL group can illuminate an angle I had not considered. But the actual change in the neural network?! That is mine to make, and mine alone!
This is why the painful moments of learning feel like something is being taken away, even when something is being added. This is because sometimes it is. A concept you have to revise is a concept you have to first partially deconstruct. A belief you genuinely reconsider is a belief you have to hold loosely and from a distance long enough to examine, which means holding it differently than you did before. That is not comfortable. You are challenging yourself (your being, your ego)… however, I am now convinced, this is the sign that learning is actually occurring, rather than merely accumulating.

This brings me to my final reflection: If learning is teaching oneself, then what is teaching?
Probably teaching is just learning turned outward. I am sure this is not a new concept: someone must have studied this and given it a name. But for me, this is a useful realization. When I teach myself, I am drawing the world in: absorbing, filtering, connecting, restructuring. When I teach others, I am doing the reverse: I am externalising my internal structure, putting my connected nodes into language or image or example, and transmitting that signal out so that another person can receive it and build something with it. They will not build the same thing I did. They will build something shaped by their own neurons, their own prior connections, their own history.
What changes between learning and teaching is the direction of the current, and the intention behind it. That’s it.

Writing this reflection is part of that same learning/teaching process. When I write this post, I’m not reporting on what I learned. I’m not teaching anyone. I am in the process of teaching myself through the act of articulation. The writing is the just the external act of thinking (reflecting). And sharing this post openly in a way that invites responses, I am making it possible for someone else to take my ideas and make them their own, necessarily changing it into something different, something that didn’t exist before either of us encountered the other. And that is not a lonely journey. That is a networked one.