The open education movement has gained momentum due to the widespread use of the internet and digital devices, allowing initiatives to provide such education and users to access it. Generally speaking, open education aims to offer freely distributed information (e.g. Open Educational Resources) and/or freely distributed courses (e.g. Massive Online Open Courses) to both educators and students (Blessinger & Bliss, 2016). The latter form, MOOCs and their respective hosting platforms, have increased in popularity and integrated of the concept ‘openness’ frequently, but rather uncritically, which brought a certain conceptual vagueness into being (Knox, 2016).

This paper aims to trace and problematize different open education discourses that operate within the European educational space by drawing upon both sociomaterial and material-semiotic approaches (e.g. Latour, 2005; Law, 2008). This contribution hence raises the question what accounts of ‘openness’, ‘education’, ‘educators’, and ‘students’ emerge in open education: the European Commission’s policy texts, narrative texts on MOOC platforms, and website source code that is entangled with those corresponding texts (e.g. code to make hyperlinks operate). The objective of this paper is therefore twofold: to trace emerging accounts of open education in order to problematize patterns of discourse, and intended for this purpose, to develop an innovative method that acknowledges the entangled nature of both text and code. This is coined as ‘material-semiotic discourse analysis’.

First, this paper aims to trace accounts of ‘openness’, ‘education’, ‘educators’, and ‘students’ in the light of recent critiques on the hyperbole and conceptual vagueness that surround open education. One example of hyperbole shows how open education is somewhat engulfed by the assumption that technological developments will resolve social issues, including procedural, temporal, or geographical barriers that limit the student’s access to higher education (Knox, 2016). ‘Openness’ hence appears on MOOC platforms within a specific conceptual milieu (Decuypere, 2018). Open education platforms and policies have included this focus on accessibility and, subsequently, often contribute to a conceptual vagueness which blurs the way they operate in the European educational space. Following a critique on this hyperbole, the proclaimed extent of openness in MOOCs is problematized by arguing that ‘openness’ is always accompanied by some form of ‘closedness’ due to selection and exclusion procedures in both the curriculum and pedagogy (Edwards, 2015). To clarify the conceptual vagueness, this research scope will not be narrowed down to mere dichotomous concepts (e.g. open/closed) or the respective underlying assumptions of what ‘openness’ means (Knox, 2016), but draws attention to other emerging conceptions and moves beyond the focus on ‘openness as accessibility’.

Second, drawing upon both sociomaterial and material-semiotic approaches (e.g. Latour, 2005; Law, 2008), this paper aims to develop an innovative research method which addresses two methodological issues concerning the characteristics of open education. Initially, it deploys the notion of digital educational governance to recognise how educational practises have moved operations to a digital space (e.g. classes held on MOOC platforms) where they are repeatedly documented, monitored and managed through digital means by numerous actors and organisations (Williamson, 2016). Analysing discourse from a sociomaterial perspective allows to trace what accounts of ‘openness’, ‘education’, ‘students’, and ‘educators’ emerge in this specific milieu. Additionally, educational policies no longer only appear in their traditional form of text and action (Ball, 1994), but websites create and spread policies too (Decuypere, 2016). For example, the European Commission not only referred to open education in its written policies, but also funded platforms for the development and distribution of European MOOCs (Decuypere, 2018). A material-semiotic lens is required to look at the how both meaningful signs (texts) and digital technologies (code) are at play in governing the educational space (Landri, 2018; Law, 2008).

The theoretical and methodological framework of this paper is informed by a sociomaterial perspective which regards multifarious actors: human and non-human (Latour, 2005). It also draws upon a relational ontology that understands these actors as intertwined and interrelated (Lemke, 2015). In order to specify the actors involved, a material-semiotic lens is adopted to recognize how these intertwined actors of meaningful signs (texts) and digital technologies (code) are operating in the educational space (Law, 2008). Hence, these perspectives are incorporated to develop a material-semiotic discourse analysis, which follows previous sociomaterial studies that extended their scope to see beyond the mentioned hyperbole (Bayne, Knox, & Ross, 2015; Gourlay, 2015; Hall, 2015). The gathered research data involve digital documents and websites from the European Commission (e.g. the policy text ‘Opening up education’), and ‘about pages’ on platforms that host MOOCs (e.g. the ‘about page’ on OpenupEd, Mirídax, and FutureLearn). The new approach is developed to analyse this data and offers three advantages. First, material-semiotic discourse analysis acknowledges the semiotic characteristics of discourse and its effects on educational practices (Rodgers, 2004), but also incorporates a relational perspective that extends the analysis of texts to identify and visualize both semiotic and digital actors (Law, 2008). This paper follows the suggestion of assembling a more elaborated network of these actors when analysing discourse (Venturini & Guido, n.d.). Second, it examines the relations between discourse and educational practices on empirical grounds by scrutinizing effects of text (Rodgers, 2004). Additionally, these relationships are understood in a way that acknowledges (non-)human actors which influence social practices (Latour, 2005). A sociomaterial perspective is opportune given the way digital actors co-shape educational practices (Williamson, 2016). And finally, the approach gathers empirical accounts of ‘openness’, ‘education’, ‘educators’, and ‘students’ which emerge in open education in order to further problematize patterns of discourse. In an attempt to “keep the social flat” and avoid a priori non-empirical explanations, such as ‘power relations’ or ‘social structures’ (Latour, 2005, p. 165), a map is assembled of open education discourses and interrelated actors that emerge through the empirical accounts. This to lay bare the meaning of these accounts, as well as how specific patterns are privileged over others (Rodgers, 2004). The characteristics of educational policies and digital education governance require an adaptation of discourse analysis to consider not only semiotic aspects, but also the performative aspects of the website source code in which the text is entangled.

The finality of this paper is twofold. Its primary outcome is the assembling of a map presenting open education discourses, with its interrelated semiotic and material actors, that emerge through the empirical accounts of ‘openness’, ‘education’, ‘educators’, and ‘students’. The map offers tree ways of reading of open education in Europe. The first way offers some identified and described accounts of open education in the European Union, where specific attention goes to the particular milieu of digital educational governance the accounts are embedded in (Williamson, 2016). The second way shows patterns of open education discourses which operate within the European educational space and impose some delimiting features. It illustrates how particular forms of open education are at the foreground and, at the same time, how others remain more hidden. This reading builds upon the analysis of digital texts and website source code; the interrelation of semiotic and technical characteristics. A final way is provided to reframe discussions about open education and not limit them to the recurring discourses, i.e. to open new possibilities for open education. Its secondary outcome is the presentation of an innovative approach to discourse analysis with a relational lens: material-semiotic discourse analysis. This development is intended for the purpose of tracing and problematizing discourse, but in a way that both the semiotic and technical characteristics of the gathered data are considered. It offers the modification of a traditional method, critical discourse analysis, and reinvigorates this established approach with a thorough empirical foundation in the analysis of text and code. The analysis of code takes into account elements and operations from coding languages such as HTML and CSS (Campbell, 2018), but emphasizes the performative aspect over an exhaustive, technical reading of code. An effort is made to indicate these operations in an intuitive way on the assembled map of open education discourses.

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