Open Education: Theoretical Underpinnings, Its Present State Today, And Its Future As An Educational Commons
Author(s):
Mathias Decuypere (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
06. Open Learning: Media, Environments and Cultures
Format:
Paper

Session Information

06 SES 05, Open Education: Debating theories and frameworks

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-23
13:30-15:00
Room:
K6.15
Chair:
Yngve Troye Nordkvelle

Contribution

Digital devices and technologies are steadily becoming commonplace in the majority of educational sectors. Nowhere is this as clear as in Open Education (OE), a generic term for a collection of practices that seek to broaden the access to education through digital means. OE is a booming sector that has received uptake and enthusiastic adoption from various corners. From a policy perspective, OE has been promoted by various organizations such the European Commission (Commission, 2013), UNESCO (Butcher, 2015) and the OECD (Orr, Rimini, & Van Damme, 2015), which all have put the aim of ‘opening up education’ high on their educational policy agendas. The most established forms of OE are, at present, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Educational Resources (OERs). Over the last five years or so, MOOCS have not only become increasingly prevalent; equally platforms such as Coursera, edX, Udacity, and Open Education Europa have arisen, which seek to centralize and/or curate these MOOCs. Next to open education in the form of massive courses (mainly) constructed by universities and disseminated through such platforms, open education equally comprises the putting online of a variety of educational materials, available for everybody to download and use. These OERs have been around for a longer period of time (the digital educational repository MERLOT, for instance, already being in operation since 1997) but still catch substantial attention of individual educators and more large-scale institutions the like (Downes, 2007; Yuan & Powell, 2013).

As often happens with the advent of new emerging technologies, initial responses of early OE adopters were very enthusiastic and at the same time often somewhat exaggerated and disparaging vis-à-vis more traditional educational practices. OE, it was proclaimed, would revolutionize the educational field in an unprecedented manner and ‘fix’ the problems with contemporary education. Technological solutionism has variously conceptualized OE as a revolution in education and learning more attuned to the times we live in (Tuomi, 2013); a democratizing tsunami due to its universal access (Comeau & Cheng, 2013); a disruptive innovation or avalanche that will inevitably and radically transform the traditional higher education market (Barber, Donnelly, & Rizvi, 2013; Yuan & Powell, 2013); and so on. All in all, from the moment of its inception up till today, the OE field has been characterized by a lot of enthusiastic yet largely unreflexive rhetoric, grand speech and hyperbole (Knox, 2013; Weller, 2014).

This paper aims to offer a critical perspective on this current OE-configuration. In order to do so, the paper will draw on systematic (critical) inquiries of the OE field that have already been undertaken. Especially over the last couple of years, more theoretical accounts have arisen that generally probe the OE field as a whole or that scrutinize concrete OE practices in an up-close manner (e.g. ibid.; Bayne, Knox, and Ross 2015; Moe 2015). This growing body of critical approaches towards OE has started to demystify some of the prevailing arguments and hyperboles circulating in contemporary OE discourse. More particularly, these critical studies seek to analyze how the introduction of digital technologies and devices that profess to be at once ‘open’ and ‘educational’ not only brings about new technological functions and opportunities, but equally renders other dimensions less important, puts them out of the picture, or simply has effects that are contrary to stated intentions (Edwards, 2015; Selwyn, 2016). In a similar vein, the general objective of this presentation is to focus on the theoretical underpinnings of the original OE movement, and more specifically to investigate whether or not these underpinnings are still in operation today.

Method

In order to identify the theoretical underpinnings of the OE movement, a literature review of the body of theoretical and reflexive literature on OE was analyzed. We thereby included both recent literature on the theoretical premises by means of which the current OE movement took the start (e.g. Weller, 2014) as well as originary literature that focuses on the importance of the notion of ‘openness’ for the educational sphere (e.g. Barth, 1977). The analysis of this literature suggests a tight association of ‘openness’ with user control (both in terms of access to materials and in terms of adaptation of these materials), notions of communality (and a concomitant emphasis on distributed collective activities) and emancipation (a striving for liberating individuals from institutional hierarchies). After analyzing and synthesizing the literature on the theoretical guidelines and assumptions driving OE, characteristics of the present state of the OE configuration were identified by means of an analysis of established (MOOC) platforms (i.c.: edX, Coursera, FutureLearn, and Udacity). The analysis comprised, first, an extensive study of the policies and terms of use of these platforms as well as, second, participation in some (randomly sampled) MOOC courses. The purpose of the analysis of the contemporary OE configuration was to balance the original theoretical underpinnings against how contemporary OE organizations are currently operating in practice, and to assess whether or not these working operations are in correspondence with the theoretical underpinnings identified. In other words, the analysis attempts to defamiliarize the various ways in which terms and concepts within the OE field (e.g. open, openness, education, learning, …) are presently being deployed, and to offer some other, alternative readings of the arrangements that are crystallizing within the contemporary OE configuration instead.

Expected Outcomes

The conclusions of the paper are threefold. First, an analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of the original OE movement will be presented. In order to do so, we provide an overview of the various meanings most commonly associated with the terms ‘openness’ and ‘education’. It will be argued that these theoretical underpinnings are situated in two general ideas: first, the idea that openness is associated with the educational commons, and second, the idea that education has to be conceived as a public good. Second, the results of the analysis of the contemporary OE configuration will be presented. The focus of this second part is situated at some arrangements that are crystallizing at present within this configuration, and more particularly at the precise sorts of ‘openness’ and ‘education’ that are currently being deployed. By adopting a critical point of view that is focused at a defamiliarization of the more established ways in which OE is currently being given shape, the analysis of the present OE configuration is directed at the constellation that has emerged now that concrete organization of OE is largely situated within massive joint ventures such as Coursera and edX (Amsler 2011). By focusing on some of the discourses, technological instruments and concrete digital spaces that are currently being deployed, it will be argued that the original theoretical ideas of the open educational commons and education as a public good are in effect often being replaced with various enclosures and different sorts of capitalization (Edwards, 2015; Neary & Winn, 2012). The presentation concludes, thirdly, with some reflections and points of interest for a reinvigoration of the original underpinnings of OE by suggesting that more deliberate attention could be given to active processes of commoning and collective experimentation.

References

Amsler, S. S. (2011). Revalorizing the Critical Attitude for Critical Education. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 9(2), 60–76. Barber, M., Donnelly, K., & Rizvi, S. (2013). An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead. London. Barth, R.S. (1977). “Beyond Open Education.” The Phi Delta Kappan, February, 489–92. Bayne, S., Knox, J., & Ross, J. (2015). Open education: the need for a critical approach. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(3), 247–250. Butcher, N. (2015). A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER). Wirtschaftsinformatik (Vol. 54). Paris: UNESCO and Commonwealth of learning. Comeau, J. D., & Cheng, T. L. (2013). Digital “tsunami” in higher education: Democratisation Movement towards Open and Free Education. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 14(3), 198–224. Commission, E. (2013). Opening up education: Innovative teaching and learning for all trhough new technologies and open educational resources. Retrieved December 17, 2015, from http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52013DC0654&from=EN Downes, S. (2007). Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3(January), 29–44. http://doi.org/10.1.1.119.6019 Edwards, R. (2015). Knowledge infrastructures and the inscrutability of openness in education. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(3), 251–264. http://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2015.1006131 Knox, J. (2013). Five critiques of the open educational resources movement. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(8), 821–832. http://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2013.774354 Moe, R. (2015). OER as online edutainment resources: a critical look at open content, branded content, and how both affect the OER movement. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(3), 350–364. http://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2015.1029942 Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2012). Open education: Common(s), commonism and the new common wealth. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 12(4), 406–423. Orr, D., Rimini, M., & Van Damme, D. (2015). Open educational resources: A catalyst for innovation. Paris: OECD Publishing. Selwyn, N. (2016). Minding our language: Why education and technology is full of bullshit... and what might be done about it. Learning, Media and Technology, 41(3), 437–443. http://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2015.1012523 Tuomi, I. (2013). Open Educational Resources and the Transformation of Education. European Journal of Education, 48(1), 58–78. http://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12019 Weller, M. (2014). The Battle for open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. http://doi.org/10.5334/bam Yuan, L., & Powell, S. (2013). MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education. Cetis, 19. http://doi.org/http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2013/667

Author Information

Mathias Decuypere (presenting / submitting)
University of Leuven
Grootlo

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