Martin Weller

“ The victory of open education, then, is that it is now a serious contender, proposed by more than just its devoted acolytes as a method for any number of higher education initiatives, be they in research, teaching or public engagement. This transition is at the heart of this book, since inherent in it are opportunities and challenges, just as a small ­start-up business must face a whole different set of issues when it grows and becomes a larger ­multi-​­national corporation. ”

“ Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as ‘open.’ And after O’Reilly’s bombastic ­interventions – ‘Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins,’ he once proclaimed in an e­ssay – ­its luster has only intensified. Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators ­likened the ‘openness’ of open source software to the ‘openness’ of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech. ”

“ The tensions in the open access publishing world are representative of those in all aspects of openness in education: Incumbents have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo; there are considerable sums of money involved; the open approach allows new entrants to the market; the open label becomes a marketing tool; and there are tensions in maintaining the best aspects of existing practice as we transition to new ones. Driving it all is a conviction that the open model is the best approach, both in terms of access and innovation. ”

“ Much of the work around open licensing, particularly that of Creative Commons, has been initiated in or influenced by higher education. Licensing is, in the eyes of many, one of the true tests of openness, as the ability to take and reuse an artefact is what differentiates open from merely free. Licences are the main route through which broader policy based initiatives can be realised. By adopting a position on licences, governments, charities, research funders, publishers and technology companies create a context whereby openness follows. ”

“ This brings us onto the second reason why openness matters, namely the function, or role, of the university. Universities can be seen as a bundle of different functions: research, teaching, public engagement, policy guidance and incubators for ideas and businesses. In times of financial downturn, every aspect of society is examined for its contribution versus its cost, and the higher education sector is no exception. ”

“ Nowhere has openness played such a central role as in education. Many of the pioneers of open movements have come from universities. The core functions of academics are all subject to radical change under an open model; from the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that are challenging teaching to ­pre-​­publication repositories that undermine the traditional publishing and review model of researchers, openness affects all aspects of higher education.
Openness has a long history in higher education. Its foundations lie in one of altruism and the belief that education is a public good. ”

“ Firstly, there is a real conflict at the heart of the direction openness takes. We’ll explore this more throughout this book, but for many of the proponents of openness its key attribute is about ­freedom – ­for individuals to access content, to reuse it in ways they see fit, to develop new methods of working and to take advantage of the opportunities the digital, networked world offers. The more commercial interpretation of openness may see it as an initial tactic to gain users on a proprietary platform, or as a means of accessing government funding. ”

“ How educators design, cost and assess the quality of all courses, not just open ones, becomes altered by digital, networked applications, but it is the addition of the catalyst of openness that really accelerates the changes and possibilities. ”

“ It is no coincidence that many of the MOOC pioneers had also been early adopters of open access, active bloggers and advocates of open licenses. Creating open courses seemed the next logical step, because they were interested in the possibilities that openness offered and had seen the benefits elsewhere in their practice. This spread of the open virus is by no means guaranteed; many practitioners remain immune, and for others the open practice remains limited to a very specific function. But it does seem to be a pattern that is repeated across all aspects of open practice. ”

“ As discussed above, open education is undoubtedly a political movement, and as with any such movement, there are hardliners in its midst. These are often well intentioned and take a stance on openness that does not permit any of the reinterpetation of the term we see with openwashing. However, as with the open source movement, this can lead to a form of openness Stalinism, where people are outed for not being open enough. Ultimately this is alienating for many academics who don’t want to be forced into open practice through fear or bullying. ”

“ In the preceding sections I hope I have started to convince you that openness has been largely victorious as an approach. By ­victorious I do not necessarily mean that all academics and students have it at the forefront of their minds, but one aspect of open education or another touches upon the practice of both learners and academics, be it students using open resources to supplement their learning, or academics publishing open access journals. ”

“ In fact, sharing is the sole means by which education is effected.’ Apart from rare (and they are much rarer than many academics believe) cases of commercial advantage regarding research, sharing as widely as possible should beat the heart of educational practice. The digital, network, open triad makes this sharing easier, drastically alters the scale at which it can be achieved and removes obstacles and costs associated with doing so, but it arises from this fundamental point that sharing is central to education. ”

“ We are accustomed in academia to conceptualising research as ­having certain components: it is often externally funded research, and it produces a traditional output such as a journal article or book. We think of research as having a certain ‘size’ for something to count. One of the implications of open scholarship, though, is that it ­creates different ways of approaching research. The dominant a­ttitude towards how research is conducted was shaped prior to the arrival of digital, networked and open technologies. ”

“ Spending on education has been increasing, while the return graduates receive in terms of increased salary has been diminishing. In short, higher education is no longer a good return on investment from a purely monetary perspective. Of course, this argument only applies where student fees are paid by the student (such as in the US and UK) ; other countries, such as Germany, provide free access to higher education. The blame for these rising costs are usually placed at the doors of universities, but in essence they are simply responding to market demands. ”

“ Given that academics are very rarely paid for contributions, then the open access impact advantage ­benefits this motivation of i­ncentive – whether the main appeal is to increase interest in the area or to improve an individual’s profile, then increasing the number of downloads and citations of an article will likely benefit these aims. This is only countered by the prestige of publishing in certain journals, whether they are open or not.
Open access publishing operates as an efficient, pragmatic model for disseminating research findings, which is the primary function of academic publishing. ”

“ Higher education is a complex, multi­-faceted offering, comprising teaching, research and social function. Rather than view it as one system, it is perhaps better viewed as a combination of smaller, interconnected ones. In this view, openness may well act as the release and reorganisation of a particular element within a university or the system as a whole. For example, publishing is one element of the overall academic system, and here the advent of open access could be seen to be pushing the existing system into release mode. ”

“ A further issue to consider with relation to openness is that of cost. Individuals often overestimate the time it takes to engage with tools such as blogs and social networking. While establishing an online identity does take some time, there is a period of investment, which has benefits once an identity has been established. Online networks can act as effective information filters, respondents to specific queries, research groupings for formal projects and dissemination routes, making it a ­time-​­saving practice. However, the cost of other aspects of openness may be underestimated. ”

“ Nobody wants to just create a useful tool; it has to disrupt an industry. Education, perceived as slow, resistant to change and ­old-​­fashioned, is seen as ripe for disruption. Christensen, Horn and Johnson (2008) themselves have deemed it so, stating, 'disruption is a necessary and overdue chapter in our public schools.' Hence the Avalanche report justifies itself by claiming that all of the key 'elements of the traditional university are threatened by the coming avalanche. ”

“ Let us consider why we measure quality. Largely it is to verify that aims and intentions have been met. The aims of the institution may be to have a sufficient number of students, for them to stay with and pass the course, and for the institution's reputation to be upheld. The educator in charge of the course may have similar aims, along with those of a professional interest in exploring the possibilities afforded by MOOCs. The student will have the aims of learning what they set out to, passing the course, enjoying the experience and gaining useful skills. ”

“ Millions of people are enhancing their learning through open resources and open courses. Put bluntly, it looks as though openness has won. And yet you would be hard pushed to find any signs of celebration amongst those original advocates. They are despondent about the reinterpretation of openness to mean 'free' or 'online' without some of the reuse liberties they had envisaged. Concerns are expressed about the commercial interests that are now using openness as a marketing tool. Doubts are raised regarding the benefits of some open models for developing nations or learners who require support. ”

“ Universities do run websites, and they are the places people look to for information. The experience the higher education sector has built up through OERs (the subject of the next chapter) , software development and website maintenance now aligns beneficially with the skills they’ve always had of editing, reviewing, writing and managing journals. So now could be the time for the rebirth of the university press as a place that runs a set of open access online journals. ”

“ Organisations such as the Open Knowledge Foundation see access to data as fundamental in accountability and engagement across a range of social functions, including politics, retail, energy, health, etc. This places openness as activism, of which education is only one aspect. As the Open Knowledge Foundation states, 'We want to see open knowledge being a mainstream concept, and as natural and important to our everyday lives and organisations as green is today' (OKFN n.d) . ”

“ While reuse is undoubtedly significant, it would also ignore some of the broader interpretations of the term, for instance while reuse may be an important aspect of open pedagogy, it also relates to a certain openness in approach, an ethos. A focus purely on reuse gives a c­ontent-​­centric view, and openness relates to practice also. The same is true for any tight definition of ‘openness’ we might adopt. We lose as much as we gain from restricting ourselves to such a definition. ”

“ Academic ­publishing is a practice that is at the core of academic identity, and as such, this fundamental change in its nature illustrates the impact of ­openness, and the importance of engaging with its future direction.
If open access publishing is the most established area for open education, then open educational resources runs a close ­second and offers a comparative study of a movement being owned largely by universities themselves. ”

“ Some of the rebranding around MOOCs is an inevitable and beneficial side effect of the increased interest in elearning that they generated. Labelling an online course a SPOC may seem strange, but it is not harmful. There is, however, a more devious element in some of the amnesia, which relates to the Silicon Valley narrative. It inflates the value of the innovation if it can lay claim to inventing a wholly new approach, and it also undermines the status of incumbents in an industry if their contribution is dismissed or forgotten, rendering the role of external agents more viable. ”

“ In terms of open education practice, resilience is about utilising the open approach where this is desirable but retaining the underlying function and identity that the existing practices represent, if they are still deemed to be necessary. The practices themselves are not core to scholarship; rather, they are the methods through which core functions are realised, and these methods can and should change. ”

“ However, the learner profile is a concern, and the experience of open universities over the past 40 years has been that open entry students require a good deal of support. The ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy of some open education projects is unlikely to be ­sufficient in overcoming the barriers to participation for many learners. This emphasises the importance of maintaining a diversity of interpretations of openness and avoiding the simplistic ‘open = free’ definition, as open entry to learning may require different models of support. ”

“ Policy will be the lever by which open practice can become sustainable and mainstream. However, the LMS lesson demonstrates that any such policy approaches must also allow sufficient scope for innovation and experimentation, as these are the route to the real benefits of openness. The innovation that openness affords provides solutions to a number of the very substantial challenges facing higher education. In some respects the digital, open revolution is the cause of these challenges, and it is also the solution. ”

“ Outside of these headline figures there are fundamental shifts in practices: academics are creating and releasing their own content using tools such as Slideshare and YouTube; researchers are releasing results earlier and using open, crowdsourcing approaches; every day millions of people make use of free, open online tools and resources to learn and share.
In fact, openness is now such a part of everyday life that it seems unworthy of comment. ”

“ There may have been a time when it was more unified, particularly in the early stages of the open education movement. To continue the battle metaphor from Chapter 1, early on it was simply a matter of positioning open vs. closed, but as the arguments advance, they become more nuanced. Not only are there different aspects of openness, but it may be that some are mutually exclusive with others, or at least that prioritising some means less emphasis on others. One way of approaching openness is to consider the motivations people have for adopting an open approach. ”

“ For instance, the notion that content should be free in terms of price was not a driving concern of the open universities or the open source software movement, although open source software often is free. It was with the development of web 2.0 that free became an expectation. One can see the various aspects of openness in education as aligning themselves with some of these principles, but not all of them. For instance, the commercial MOOCs are taking the free cost and open access element, but not necessarily the freedom to reuse. ”

“ So with existing publishers on one side demanding high fees for open access, whilst also continuing with subscription models, and predatory journals seeking to swindle money from authors on the other, it can feel to many authors that open access has not improved the practice of publishing at all. This is a reminder of the lessons we saw from other victories in Chapter ­1 – ­victory doesn’t feel like victory should. ”

“ It's an area where openness has 'won', to a large extent, with mandates from research funders, government and institutions which make open access publishing compulsory. And yet at the time of victory, open access advocates are also beset with doubt and conflict.
The Gold route is to make journals open access, so any reader can access the content free of charge. The focus of the Gold route is on using journals as the means to share content. There are different ways that such journals can be funded; for example, a university or professional society might fund the journal itself. ”

“ Openness in education has many strands leading to it, and depending on the particular flavour of open education one is considering, some of these will be more prevalent than others. This makes talking about open education as a clearly defined entity or movement problematic, and adopting a single definition is c­ounter-​­productive. Just as open education has many inter-​­related aspects, such as open access, OER, MOOCs and open scholarship, so it is defined by overlapping but distinct influences. ”