Reflections on Topic 2 - "Openness" in Learning

The topic this week really challenged me.  If I had to describe my approach to 'openness' in teaching to date, I would say:

- There was complete 'openness' between my students and myself - I was transparent about the course objectives and my expectations and I made a real effort to make the content and presentation of my materials accessible and understandable to students.
- I was open with colleagues with my materials - at my own institution and colleagues based at other institutions.
- I openly shared teaching practices and approaches with colleagues, including mistakes and things that did not work.
- With my research, I posted as much of my research as possible openly on twitter, SSRN, academia.edu - but while complying with the restrictions in place by publishers.

However, the materials I have read for this topic and the discussions I have had in my PBL have really made me think about how this 'openness' was actually fairly closed - I transact with a fairly small circle and circuit of people (students and colleagues).  Going forward, I will be looking at how I can try and reach a larger audience as a teacher.  As observed by Bali et al (2020), open education resources and practices can have a real pedagogical advantage, but also a broader impact on redressing different forms of social injustice.

I cannot do justice to the vastness of this topic. In this post, I just sets out some thoughts I have at this stage.

How would I describe openness?

There are many different interpretations of openness and many different practices that realise 'openness' (MOOCs, Coursera, Edux, University of the People etc).  It can also extent to open courses, open pedagogy, open educational resources, open access, open data, open scholarship (Weller (2014)).  For me, having explored these different sources, 'openness' would mean primarily the reach of my course and materials and also how much access the students who took the course would have to me, as the instructor.  Beyond that, it would be openness to other course developers and teachers - and this would turn on how I licensed / attached permissions to my material and content via the different categories of Creative Commons Licence.  It is this that gives me the greatest cause for pause - in making things available openly, we open ourselves up.  While almost all of us would gladly welcome positive and constructive feedback and would, in fact, actively seek it out.  However, in opening up in the way most do, we lose control over this feedback.  This requires a consideration of our own individual reservations with sharing openly and how we might overcome those reservations.  

Am I willing to share openly?  What are my reservations?

There is a tension between wanting to be as ‘open’ as possible - in the interests of social justice (see Bali et al (2020); Peter et al (2013); Cape Town Open Education Declaration) and countervailing considerations like protecting the privacy of your students / yourself; protecting proprietary aspects of your materials; losing a sense of control / ownership of materials and content; and also the fact that sharing openly might lead you to feel more inhibited in how much you experiment in your course - you may not want to be open at the exploratory / 'beta testing' stage of course development and instead want to test in a smaller / safer setting. Finally, there is the big question of value - and this applies to me as a student / learner and not just educator. At the moment, the value of my courses is determined by the institutional setting in which they are embedded. My experience is with students enrolled at tertiary educations who have paid for their education and this payment creates a certain transactional value - the courses I deliver at the institution will have value because they lead to a university degree and one that the students have paid a significant amount for. What happens when I remove the institutional setting? If I make my course freely and openly available, how do I generate the value proposition for my students? As a student myself, how do I make decisions about open courses that I take? I turn to consider this next.

How can I generate a sense of value where my course is open / free?

In their study on student perceptions of value' of open education resources, Abramovich and McBride (2018) ask the question - if something is available for free, how do we know its' value? They observe that "any organization implementing OER might consider that adoption of OER among users (e.g., students, instructors) cannot be solely based on an appeal to financial savings but must also consider more complex heuristics for determining value.” So how do I create a sense of value for users of open courses I offer - because that can determine something as critical as their motivation and how much they invest in the course? As an educator, it is a delight to teach a group of motivated students and can be very challenging when that motivation is lacking. It is clear that open courses cannot rely on financial value. This was a topic of discussion in my PBL. The answer is a complex set of factors - it is not just about students receiving a certificate or qualification of some kind at the end of the course; but also a question of how much they are empowered / engaged; do they learn new skills / feel a sense of upskilling; does the identity of the instructor matter; the course content will need to be innovative, engaging, current, bespoke versus generic. This is a significant responsibility for the open educator.

Closing Reflections

The benefits of 'openness' in education can be clearly accepted by many. We can readily and instinctively understand the need for having as broad an access to education and knowledge as possible - redressing the social injustices that Bali et al (2020) discuss. However, in the same paper, Bali et al (2020) also caution that we need to be conscious about how we design and practice open education - we need to be cautious of structural issues in the field (from the simple fact that not every student will have access to digital technology and connectivity to the more complex issues of bias in the field i.e. how some student voices, groups and communities are more naturally excluded from the open educational space). (See also Weller et al (2017) and Bali et al (Open at the Margins)). This imposes a responsibility on educators to think about 'openness' not just quantitatively i.e. how open is my course in terms of reach but also qualitatively - am I providing real and genuine open access / open education.