Open Air

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• 1. Andy Lane  |  November 5th, 2008 at 10:51 am

  A key aspect is what the epithet open is attached to. I wrote about opening up education in the Carnegie Foundation book you blogged about a few weeks back. I have also written about open learning in parts a few times but below is an extract from a draft paper which sets out my thinking in more detail:

  “Definitions and names can quickly multiply and become confusing: open learning, distance learning, supported self study, informal adult learning, home study, e-learning, lifelong learning and flexi study to name but a few have all been used in different way to describe certain facets of the act of learning. The Open University prefers to use the term Supported Open Learning for its formal provision and you can find out more about this particular approach at http://www.open.ac.uk/about/ou/p5.shtml. Now we have open content, open courseware and open educational resources as additional names to conjure with.

  This diversity of names reflects the diversity of provision and modes of study and at times debates about such names and definitions can become sterile. What we believe is more important is to determine the principles upon which the provision should be based, principles that address a fundamental right of access to education on the part of all. And the most basic principles we believe that all education, not just adult learning, should follow, is that of the primacy of the learner and their context in shaping their learning experiences and the extent of openness in the provision that tries to meet those contextual needs.

  We say a bit more about the primacy of the learners and their context later but wish to comment here on the concept of openness and what that can mean for learning. The Open University was founded on the principle of openness and the mission set by our founding Chancellor, Lord Crowther, as noted above, to be ‘open as to people, places, methods and ideas’. There are many ways to interpret openness and those four opens. Our open access policy, for example, means that not having prior educational qualifications does not bar you from studying with The Open University; it removes one barrier to study and increases the freedoms available to learners (however tuition and s assessment for courses is not free to all, although there are many support schemes for those on low incomes that can drastically reduce these costs). Similarly, our work with the BBC has meant that (free to view at first then free to record) educational radio and TV programmes have been openly available through terrestrial public service broadcasting in the UK ever since we began teaching in 1971. So, people have the freedom to access and to copy this particular content but not the freedom to use for educational or public performance purposes without a licence or prior permission. Nevertheless, as we also discuss later, the physical nature of much current educational provision (tied to a particular place such as a classroom or lecture hall), bound up in a particular medium (such as text or audiovisual asset), and available only at pre-defined times (to suit employment norms), has meant that the locus of control was much more with the providers of learning opportunities – the teachers, than the users – the learners.

  The advent of digital technologies and the internet in particular is changing this dynamic because it helps remove some of these barriers, making digital content much more accessible and available and enabling new forms of instantaneous communication between people in different places and times. However, even more significant than these hard or commercial technologies, has been the emergence of soft or social technologies in new forms of licensing for (largely) digital content. This ‘some rights reserved open licensing’ (for example the Creative Commons licences) placed on new and previously ‘all rights reserved’ copyrighted content enables the free copying, sharing, reuse and remixing of that content within pre-defined guidelines. This development has been central to the emergence of OERs which go well beyond just the issue of open access, as in open access publishing of research publications, where authors can still try to control (or close down) all uses of the material not already defined and allowed in copyright law. The philosophy of open licensing and OERs is that you want people to take the content away and do things with it. In principle this gives learners (and teachers) even more freedoms as they can decide when to access it, whether they want to alter it, and how they learn from it in ways they choose.

  Openness, when looked at in terms of OERs, is therefore centrally concerned with freedoms as expressed in the open licences:

  • Freedom from paying any money to access and use the content for specified purposes;
  • Freedom to copy and make many more copies;
  • Freedom to take away and re-use without asking prior permission;
  • Freedom to make derivative works;
  • But not necessarily freedom to make profits from it.

  So, openness can be equated with freedoms, but the degrees of freedom available within a particular openness can vary (as seen in the spectrum of Creative Commons licences themselves) and can be influenced by many other factors. Schaffert and Geser (2007 at http://www.elearningeuropa.info/directory/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=11117&doclng=6) have set out four dimensions or openness for OERs where they feel that all need to be present for maximum openness. For example, a document written with MicroSoft Word™ can easily be shared, copied and altered if it has an open licence but it does mean that you as the author and others re-using it have to have purchased proprietary software to do so.

  The question as to why we launched a large OER initiative was more one of what exactly should we do rather than one of should we bother at all. OERs flow naturally from our mission but this does not mean that we did not, and do not, have to carefully examine and assess the impact of such a move on current policies and practices and how they in turn impact on the contexts in which our learners/students find themselves.

  It is our experience that many traditional forms of learning are ‘closed’ off to many potential beneficiaries because of structural barriers (Lnae, 2008 at http://www.wikieducator.org/images/f/f2/PID_405.pdf). (Supported) Open learning, which we continually aspire to operate, is predicated on the belief that openness in many forms is a key element to reaching out to as many people as possible, removing some of these barriers. However, while such learning may be openly available in principle there can still be many barriers to some groups accessing or availing themselves of those opportunities. Even more critical is the plight of displaced people who may have to cope with a different system of provision and a different language of instruction to that of their home country. Is the provision acceptable to them and their context?

  The advent of digital technologies and their use within e-learning or blended learning schemes has both opened up further possibilities for open learning by increasing the scope for much more non face-to-face two-way interaction and collaboration between groups of learners and their teachers. At the same time the availability, accessibility and acceptability of this mode of teaching and learning is extremely variable, with socially excluded groups or communities being those who do not have much access to such technologies, may find few opportunities available to them in their circumstances and are worried that they cannot cope with these new technologies and ways of learning. In other words they do not feel included even when people are trying to reach out to them because they lack confidence in their competence to succeed – they feel disempowered.

  This disempowerment can be viewed as excluded communities having few, if any, degrees of freedom to engage even with open learning provision. The contrast here is between the discourse and practice of making educational materials, activities and opportunities as open as possible by certain groups in societies and with the freedoms that are embodied within the different types of openness. We not once again the example of the Open University’s practice of open access to undergraduate courses where no prior qualifications are needed to register – that is students have freedom from discrimination on the basis of prior achievement. However open access does not mean that the course is free of cost or that there are constraints to the freedom of when the course can be studied and assignments submitted. Another example is OERs themselves, where there is much greater freedom around cost (they are free to access although there may be costs to being online) and time of study (they can be studied at any time as long as they are available and accessible by the user – that is they can get online). These freedoms are aided by the relative abundance and the potentially non-destructive, replicable and recorded nature of the original digital material and all versions made of it. This means that in principle one person’s freedom to use the content is not closed off by another person’s freedom to use it (as does happen with scarcity of physical resources).

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