Open education

“ Cape Town Open Education Declaration:
Unlocking the promise of open educational resources We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In addition, there are policies which may have a strong influence on open education but which are not directly open education policies themselves. For instance, agreed systems of assessing prior learning and acknowledging informal learning would aid the adoption of OERs and MOOCs, without explicitly being OER policies. ”

“ All of this is made possible by openness in several other areas: resources need to be made openly available, technology needs to be free to use, students need to be prepared to work in the open and universities need to accept these new models of operating. I would suggest that we are only just at the beginning of exploring models of teaching and learning that have this open mindset. It is notable that many of these early experimenters in open pedagogy are people associated with the open education movement. ”

“ We also encourage those who sign to pursue additional strategies in open educational technology, open sharing of teaching practices and other approaches that promote the broader cause of open education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Educators and learners: First, we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The concept of open education encapsulates a simple but powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good and that the open web provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge. ”

“ The solution open education offers here is to easily demonstrate all of the aspects of higher education that might be championed as worthwhile. If it is the quality of resources, then OERs can reveal why there is depth beyond the Wikipedia article. If it is about research, then open access articles demonstrate the value of in-depth research that is not commercially funded and biased. Open scholarship highlights that individual academics are not operating in isolation and are engaged with the broader community and implications. ”

“ Often the articles were little more than publicity pieces for the MOOC companies involved, with no critical evaluation of the projected claims. From the open education perspective, the question is why would one branch of open education attract so much excitement, while another one does not? ”

“ 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. ”

“ What open education can do effectively, however, is influence related factors. For example, creating a course using a wide range of good-quality OERs will reduce the amount of bespoke material that is required. This may reduce the time required to produce the course or provide a higher-quality course for the same investment. As we saw in the discussion on OERs, they are frequently used by students prior to study or while engaged in formal education. This may reduce the number of students who take a subject they subsequently don’t like or help retain those who are already in a course. ”

“ However, open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. ”

“ Use of OER leads to critical reflection by educators, with evidence of improvement in their practice. OER adoption at an institutional level leads to financial benefits for students and/or institutions. Informal learners use a variety of indicators when selecting OER. Informal learners adopt a variety of techniques to compensate for the lack of formal support, which can be supported in open courses. Open education acts as a bridge to formal education, and is complementary, not competitive, with it. ”

“ When educational institutions support their educators, staff, and learners in moving from closed to open content and practices, Open Education thrives. Educators want to design the best courses, adjust their practices and pedagogy to empower learners to co-create knowledge, and push the limits of knowledge by openly sharing their ideas and resources with a global audience. ”

“ It also provides a framework for considering the different aspects of openness as being connected into part of a larger whole while maintaining the integrity of that larger system. As Walker and Salt argue, ‘There is a much higher likelihood of crossing a threshold into a new regime if you are unaware of its existence,’ so an appreciation of the impact of open education may be the best method for maintaining resilience. ”

“ Although use of OER can support open learning/open education, the two are not the same. Making 'open education' or 'open learning' a priority has significantly bigger implications than only committing to releasing resources as open or using OER in educational programmes. It requires systematic analysis of assessment and accreditation systems, student support, curriculum frameworks, mechanisms to recognize prior learning, and so on, in order to determine the extent to which they enhance or impede openness. ”

“ I would suggest that there are three key strands that lead to the current set of open education core concepts: open access education, open source software and web 2.0 culture.
Open Universities
Open access to education goes back beyond the foundation of the Open University (OU) , with public lectures, but let us take the establishing of the Open University as the start of open access education as it is commonly interpreted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the different categories of open education, OERs can be seen as occupying a middle ground, intersecting with open access, through open textbooks, and MOOCs, which can be seen as a subset of OERs. The OER field is constituted of a mixture of ­universities, national agencies, ­not-­​­for-​­profit organisations and commercial interests. ”

“ Similarly, the use and sharing of teaching content through OERs and MOOCs is fundamental to the identity of educators. Understanding how openness relates to identity and how it is being shaped by online practice may seem like an interesting but peripheral concept, but it will determine the shape of open education. In the next section, this will be explored in more detail by examining how open scholarship can affect one particular practice. ”

“ The two are generally clumped together, and indeed many open source advocates are passionate about freedoms also. It is worth noting the difference, however, as it has resonance with the motivations in open education. Openness in education can be seen as a practical approach; for instance, the learning object movement of the early 2000s often used the argument of efficiency, as we shall see in the next chapter. But the ‘social’ argument is also at the core of open education, making the outputs of publicly funded research available to all, rather than in proprietary databases. ”

“ Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections. ”

“ This highlights that open education, as well as offering solutions to some issues, brings with it a new set of concerns, which need to be addressed. The severity and impact of these problems is not clear. Some may be attributed to open education still being relatively new, and changes in practice take time to establish themselves. Awareness of online resources has greatly increased over the past decade, although often it is confined to popular sites such as YouTube, iTunes U, and TED talks. ”

“ In this section some of the more specific problems associated with an open approach will be raised. This will not be an exhaustive list of such issues, but rather a representative one, with the intention of highlighting some of the problems that arise as a direct consequence of openness.
One of the most worrying problems associated with open education is that it isn’t reaching the people it needs to, or claims to. As we have seen, much of the rhetoric for both OERs and MOOCs stresses the democratising nature of open approaches. ”

“ One reason is the difficulty of determining where to begin telling the ­story – ­for there is never a true starting point to a tale woven of people, events and ideas.’ The choice of ­starting point will have an influence on the type of interpretation of open education put forward: the OU-​­based one may suggest a university and student focused approach, whereas the open source one might indicate a more technological and licence driven perspective. ”

“ Before we examine the impact of this commercial aspect on the nature of openness in MOOCs, it is worth considering some of the positive aspects of the rapid increase in profile for open education and elearning in general. For many educational technologists who had strived for years to get fellow academics or senior managers interested in different aspects of open education, MOOCs provided a means of getting attention and funding. ”

“ This recent history illustrates the potential danger in allowing control and direction of open education to be determined by external parties. Universities too quickly become the consumers of this solution rather than the driving force behind it. ”

“ Keywords Open Educational Resources, Open Educational Practices, Open Education, Wikipedia, Centers for Teaching and Learning, Higher Education.
1. INTRODUCTION Educators and education institutions are increasingly looking to engage with Open Educational Resources (OER) , and with practices based on participation in online learning communities like Wikipedia, as they update their teaching practices. There is great potential in these realms, but there is a scarcity of useful, formal research and case studies to inform innovation and experimentation. ”

“ Action: Host an annual “Open Education” day at your school or university. Empower stakeholders to drive your institution’s Open Education strategy. Action: Create an Open Education Task Force comprised of learners, faculty, accessibility experts, deans, bookstore, financial aid, and library staff, instructional designers, eLearning, and so on. Ensure that all of the content you fund is OER. Action: Draft, adopt, and implement an open licensing policy requiring university or school-funded resources to be openly licensed (preferably CC BY 4.0) . ”