We´ve now almost finished the second topic of this course:  Open learning – Sharing and Openness. This is a topic that really relates to my everyday life, as I more or less daily reflects on different aspects of my teaching.

The first weeks of this course I was full of enthusiasm for trying out all these, to me, new digital tools. The sky was the limit….

I was thus a bit surprised, and got these awkward feeling of being naïve when digging into this topic – Open Learning – Sharing and Openness. I had not spent a lot of time reflecting over security and drawbacks with going open. Then reading the excellent openly available book by Martin Weller from Open University UK – The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn´t feel like victory” (2014) (1) it made my grounds shake a bit.

He makes the analogy with the green movement and the “7 sins of greenwashing” (Terra Choice, 2010) (2) , i.e. the green movement becoming “a marketable quality”, in that “Once a term [like open] gains mainstream acceptance it will be used for commercial advantage” (Weller, 2014) (1) . This was shown by Bohannan (2013) (3), demonstrating the back side of the Gold route of OAP (Open Access Publishing) where the APCs (Article Processing Charges) is paid by the author to make the article open. He wrote a fake paper, full of fatal flaws, and submitted it to 304 Open Access journals of which 157 accepted the paper for publication, clearly revealing the market value of the term “openness”

Then listening to Kay Oddone´s and Alastair Creelmans very interesting webinar as well as tweetchat, where very rightly, the concerns of open media and security were addressed, made me feel even more innocent in this “predatory world of openness.

It really made me much more aware of the huge profits the publishers make, not the least publishers of scientific journals which publish work performed by research groups and peer reviewed for free by other scientists. So, there´s my naivety again, thinking I did a good job reviewing papers and feeling guilty when sometimes turning requests for review down when times at work gets too busy.

During the course of this topic I ran a seminar about host-microbe interactions for the second time at our Medical School. Students are asked to prepare to discuss invasion and immune evasion strategies of, as well as host defense (immune responses) against four different pathogens, a bacteria, a virus, a protozoa and a fungus. Everyone prepares to “debate” all four pathogens and the immune response against each pathogen in a “role play”, and each small group are then randomly selected for one “role”, at the seminar. Thus a lot of focus is to find data before the seminar.

I therefore added in the evaluation the statement “I could think of using digital tools to share my/our preparations with the rest of the course (following a short introduction from the seminar leader” Of 50 students, 12% disagreed totally or partially, 32% neither agreed or disagreed, and finally, 56% of the students agreed partially or totally. I was a bit surprised that as many as 44% of the students were not immediately positive to using digital tools.

I have been reflecting on their seemingly reluctance to go digital. One explanation could be competition – not wanting to share their work with others. Another possibility could be reluctance to expose themselves for the teacher.

I like the statement by Kay Oddone at the webinar, about the role as a teacher changing from being a provider of information to being more of a coach and inspiration (do not remember exactly how she phrased it…). I think using digital tools can activate students more than the current posting of PowerPoint handouts from your lecture on Blackboard or whatever learning management system (LMS) your university is using. All our students record the lectures on their phones and listen to them afterwards. Maybe one should record a “lecture” and provide them with, and then use the time for the lecture more as a seminar, to discuss different aspects of the “lecture”. There are still several questions that I have to find the answers to before going open: e.g. would I then have these lectures open to everyone, or for this course only? What are the responsibility of my university in protecting me if going open? And what is my obligations to my university?

I always encourage students to contact me during the course, rather than two days before the written exam, to encourage more deep learning. They write to me via e-mail, I reply to that student and towards the end of the course I post all anonymized questions and my replies on Blackboard. It would be nice to able to use a digital tool as e.g. Padlet for this. I am however still reluctant to do that. What would be the risks and/or drawbacks with going open, compared to the way I am doing it now? I am still not sure and clearly needs to reflect more om this.

In the video “Learning Management system or the open web?” (4), it is argued that a combination of a commercial LMS that your university has invested in will provide safety for the students as far as e.g. assessment and feedback goes, also providing support for both students and faculty, and one or several open platforms that students are more familiar with, might be the best option. I can relate to that in that we are having problems to reach out to our students with information posted on Blackboard, as “blackboard means boring stuff”. Whereas if one student reads the message on Blackboard and posts it on Facebook, it reaches every student within minutes! I think these issues of openness in education should be discussed much more, both with department heads, deans and vice-chancellors at our universities, as well as with our students!

1.) Weller, M –  The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn´t feel like victory, 2014. https://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/books/10.5334/bam/(last visited 181026)

2.) Terra Choice, 2010. http://sinsofgreenwashing.com/findings/the-seven-sins/index.html(last visited 181026)

3.) Bohannon, J. Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?Science2013, Vol. 342, Issue 6154, pp. 60-65, DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60(last visited 181026)

4.) Watson, K. (2014)Learning management systems or the the open web?, Learning to teach online UNSW.https://www.coursera.org/lecture/teach-online/case-study-learning-management-system-or-the-open-web-optional-1EHsq(last visited 181026)