As an academic domain, education presents a particularity in that it encompasses both discourse and action (Bedin et al., 2019): discourse guides action and vice versa. The concept of praxis captures the actual continuity between theory (discourse) and practice (action) (Evans, 2007).

It has been shown that 1) it takes 20 years for an innovation to come into widespread practice (Burkhardt & Schoenfeld, 2003); and 2) the research we are currently conducting is not that which is needed because it focuses on things (e.g. mobile devices) and not on real life problems in line with Sustainable Development Goal 4 (e.g. how to integrate the 258 million unschooled children and youth to the knowledge society[1]) (Reeves & Lin, 2020).

The Bologna process, and subsequently the Lisbon declaration, marked the official policy shift toward the knowledge society and economy (Huisman et al., 2012). But although this paradigm shift in policy began 20 years ago, practice is only now catching up: indeed, education now finds itself in a troublesome transition phase. To these difficulties has been added the public-health crisis, highlighting the shortcomings of education and the limited capacity of institutions to respond to new stakeholder demands – particularly those of learners.

At the level of practice though, the web was invented 30 years ago to support international exchanges among scholars[2]. For unknown reasons, this initial objective was pushed into the background after the web’s first decade of existence, although it remained important for certain communities (e.g. software design) and in individual practices of early adopters. Today, the Open movement (Blessinger & Bliss, 2016; Stacey, 2018) embodies these early inclusive and open values. We know that Open Education (OE) is based on core underlying principles such as design for access, agency, ownership, participation and experience. We know that frameworks for adoption of OE in higher education institution exist (Inamorato dos Santos et al., 2016). We know that Creative Commons provide a legal framework to support new economic models built around the commons (Stacey & Hinchliff Pearson, 2017). We also have ideas on how to connect the different Open movements to educate citizens in the knowledge society[3] (Santos-Hermosa, 2019). However, even if issues of open admission, open recognition, open assessment and open credentials are being discussed at the levels of theory (Wiley, 2017), and at cultural change (Chiappe et al., 2016), we are only just starting to share feedback in the form of concrete experiences. Finding creative ways of operationalising Open Education is a collective endeavour. This paper is but a small contribution to this endeavour.

The theoretical framework of this study combines sociomateriality, and more specifically Actor-Network Theory, with Open Education. Sociomateriality in education research addresses flows, connections and interactions between human and material objects enacted for the purpose of learning (Fenwick et al., 2012). Open Education is defined in terms of human rights theory and abundance by (Blessinger & Bliss, 2016, p. 13) and in terms of “access, equity, distribution, participation, innovation, and sustainability” by Stacey and Hinchliff Pearson (2017, p. 7), as well as from a quality perspective (Stracke, 2019).

[1] https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/educationday

[2] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

[3] https://paulgstacey.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/landscapeofopenstacey.jpg

The guiding question for this study is: How do practitioners of an international online research methods course conceive of Open Education? The sampling strategy is based on criteria which are rather broad: participants had to be either learners, tutors or decision makers who had actively taken part in the researcher’s international training course (e.g. learners must have received the course attestation) and ethically agreed to take part in the research. The sample included 15 PhD students, 3 tutors and 3 decision makers from European and African francophone countries. The training course itself consisted of three modules: research data management, qualitative methodology, and quantitative methodology. It was developed with international partners and offered to a diverse francophone audience of doctoral students during the 2018-9 academic year. This study, which is part of a larger design-based research project (McKenney & Reeves, 2019), focuses on the potential of moving such training to Open Education. The data used in this study come from qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted after the training course was over, in 2019 and 2020; only those portions that pertain to the issue of opening up the training course were considered. The semi-structured-interview data-collection method was chosen to generate knowledge in an interactive way, as both the interviewer and the interviewee actively participate in the knowledge-building process in this type of interview. A content thematic analysis was then performed to provide insights relevant to the research question, building on perceptions of participants. Finally, intercoder agreement was calculated to check data and coding reliability (Savin-Baden & Howell Major, 2013). The study’s limits – which, seen another way, represent one of its key strengths – relate to the researchers' subjectivity, which was largely due to the researcher’s dual role as both a teacher and designer within the pedagogical environment of the training course and as a researcher in the research project that stemmed from it.

With regard to students, results showed that this group was primarily concerned with technological access – appropriate Internet-connected devices. In addition, students’ awareness of Open Education was limited to Open Educational Resources – more specifically, students tended to conceive of themselves as "consumers of these resources". When presented with the philosophy of Open Education, however, students unreservedly agreed with its values and perspective. With regard to tutors, this group raised questions regarding the legal recognition of on-line learning which has not yet been achieved in certain countries. They were definitely concerned with the certification that learners receive (i.e. the institutions delivering it, type of certification, quality assurance system, etc.) and the extent to which that certification would be valued. This group also tried to set a good example by using Open Education practices themselves and by helping interested teachers they knew. Finally, with regard to decision makers, this group was primarily concerned with learning as an interactive act. In their view, providing learners with resources was important, but resources could be considered as "inert". To them, the most important aspect of Open Education was the international collaborative effort to interact with learners and start from their research and questions. This group also reported that they did not fully understand the status of MOOCs - Open Educational Resources or Open Courseware - and pushed for the interconnection of Open Education with Open Science. In view of these results, we may conclude that educational practice as well as discourse recommends raising awareness about the new paradigm of Open Education, which can decolonise learning and give a new start to epistemic justice (Kidd et al., 2017). The Open movement is already well advanced in European policy; it now falls to practitioners to creatively find ways to operationalise it in practice.

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