Image: James Wainscoat

 

The basic idea of openness in education is easy to digest and even easier to celebrate: education for all! No barriers, no exclusion, free sharing of knowledge. I was amazed at how quickly the idea of openness became more complicated and difficult to grapple with once thinking about it in action more concretely.

Students

First, on the student side: How can we offer education that is truly open to all? Bates (2015) plainly acknowledges that “No teaching system is completely open (minimum levels of literacy are required, for instance)”. Internet is also required it seems. We struggle with the boundary of openness in our student body all the time in our department. We want to keep the master’s program open to people from as wide a range of backgrounds as possible to make the cohort more interesting and bring in a variety of different perspectives. But allowing students from some academic backgrounds means they will not have the skill set to take on the work they must do. The question then becomes how can you teach students with no prior knowledge of some things without lowering the expectations of how far they will come in a certain time period? This question may be why Kortemeyer (2013) unhappily notes that “OERs have not noticeably disrupted the traditional business model of higher education”. So, open education is simply providing something other than what universities provide? Weller (2014) describes open education as a bridge to formal education, not a competitor. As a university lecturer, do I need to be on top of OER trends then? I have come to the conclusion that I do, as I will explain in a roundabout way.

Teachers

Then there is the teachers’ perspective on open education, and here I must confess I am guilty of Wiley’s Ted Talk characterization of the old-fashioned way of thinking that is upheld by law: Mine!!! It makes me nervous to think about sharing carefully prepared lecture slides and notes for anyone to “reuse, redistribute, revise, remix and retain”. When I think about this more, I am not entirely sure why except that there is a general discomfort around needing to keep track of everything and get credit for everything I do in order to get tenure, etc. But I know the benefits of open sharing of resources first-hand. The greatest improvements to my lectures often come from innovative ways other teachers have found to make a point or demonstrate a technique that they generously posted online. (of course I give credit in my slides to them, but they do not know that)

Teaching style

So those are the two reservations I discovered I have about open education. Then I realized I did not have a clear sense of how teaching differed in an open vs, traditional classroom setting. I sensed that it was different, with problem-based learning being central, and learners managing learning themselves (Bates 2015). This made no sense to me as a teacher of statistics, for example. Students have no idea what they will be learning until they learn it, so how can they discover it? I did some reading to try to discover if there was some sort of guide for taking top-down knowledge like this and putting it into a different format that may facilitate open learning. I was not successful at finding any such guide. So then I explored what learning statistics looks like in open online learning. I was disappointed (and slightly relieved) to discover it does not look much different to how it is done in the classroom. I read many,  many reviews of teachers and courses, paying attention to how students described the course and the main mode was video lectures. What I realized in discussion with my group, however, is that there were elements of a different approach. For example, courses are self-paced. Also, whereas in a classroom we often have question and answer periods during classroom time, in good online courses students mentioned whether the teacher was active in chatroom discussions about the material and assignments. The unique opportunities this provides for more discussion and openness are clear to me.

So, my eyes are open to the possibilities and looking forward to identifying other ”open” practices to bring into my teaching!

 

References

Bates, T. (2015). Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning.
(This is probably the best guide there is today to teaching in a digital context. Worth reading the whole book but for this unit you can focus on Chapter 10, Trends in open education.)

Kortemeyer, G. (2013) Ten years later: Why open educational resources have not noticeably affected higher education, and why we should care. Educause Review, Nov/Dec 2013. Retrieved from http://er.educause.edu/articles/2013/2/ten-years-later-why-open-educational-resources-have-not-noticeably-affected-higher-education-and-why-we-should-care.

Weller, M. (2014). Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press.
(If you can, try to read all of this excellent overview of the whole question of openness but if you can’t, focus on Chapter 4, Open Educational Resources, and Chapter 5, MOOCs.)

Wiley, D. Open education and the future, Short TED-talk