When I think of open education I tend to think of it at a granular level, in terms of open educational resources (OER), opencourseware (OCW), or even the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). At these more limited levels engaging in open education makes a lot of sense to me, and offers very attainable, short-term goals which serve bot the “target audience” (whoever that is) and my institution. But OER, OCW and open education are not synonymous. Open education, though often referred to as a “movement” is a broader philosophy, one which prescribes aspects of the creation, release, and access to education. Whereas proponents of open educational resources may have the goal of distributing and reusing learning content or objects in current educational settings, and whereas proponents of OCW may have as their goal the replication and distribution of the current educational activities of institutions, open education may utilize these two sub-movements as tools or in support of their own interests, but not necessarily adhere to their particular goals.
So what is the open education movement, and what defines it? The closest thing to an open education manifesto may be the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (September 2007), a product of a convening of the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. It states that open education “is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.” It implicitly seeks to free education from copyright constraints, and its rhetoric echoes the argument that education is a right, not a privilege, recalling the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, in Article 26.1, states, “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. … Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit” (my emphases). It should be no surprise, then, that the open educational resources movement is credited as having been born of UNESCO in it’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education. Though both the UNESCO forum and Cape Town declaration were preceded by others’ efforts to open content, knowledge, and courseware, these two documents provide the fundamentals of a definition of open education.
What may be surprising is how long it took UNESCO to get around to promoting the idea of open educational resources, but that can be attributed to the lack of technology by which information can be easily published, reproduced, and accessed by consumers from around the world–it’s clear that the Internet provides the key solution here, though it’s less clear what role evolving cultural attitudes, particularly in the west, to “free” or “open” products or content may have played.
On the first day of Dr. David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education course he answered a student’s question about the challenges that now face open education as including, first and foremost, sustainability. I have on a few occasions suggested that as we continue to move from the “traditional” classroom with chalk and photocopies to “hybird” and even fully online classrooms, the opportunities for publishing open educational resources will expand, and engaging in open education will be facilitated. In fact, not only can the practice of open education become a part of the normal process of creating and publishing educational resources, I believe it must for two reasons: first, I don’t believe open education will ever be widely adopted if it is reliant on millions of dollars in grant moneys (though those grant moneys were clearly important for kick-starting the open education movement, as demonstrated by the pioneering work of MIT OpenCourseWare, USU OpenCourseWare, et c.). Second, if the open education movement is not owned by the day-to-day practicing educators, instructional technologists, and designers, if its banner is not carried by both students and teacher, I believe it has a hard chance of sticking. Brian Lamb, recently spun off a blog post in which he voices his grassrooty motivation, and, spinning off of an article by fellow Canadian Michael Geist, suggests that the key problem is lack of leadership, not funding.
I agree that much of the work of perpetuating and enlarging the open education movement must and will come from the “grassroots”, and it can be a natural step in the digitization and technological enhancement of education that I have had the joy of being involved in for nearly a dozen years. Hook them gradually. Use freely available OER as a gateway drug. Use blogs and wikis and the power of the reputation economy to develop the drive. Through small steps we might take the learning materials and activities that are masked behind the opaque walls of the classroom into a translucent, and sometimes transparent setting of the public internet.
P.S.
(It’s possible that open education may be moved forward not first by educators, but first by administrators; to this end so far we’ve seen institutions use the carrot of financial compensation; I wonder what might happen if they chose to use a stick instead. At my institution, Utah Valley University, most of the content that would be considered for open educational resources is already owned by the institution, as it was produced under work-for-hire or with significant enough institutional resources to justify ownership. UVU could very well say, “We are doing OER, we are going to publish these faculty-created materials, and you can pound sand if you don’t like it.” If any of you know of institutions who have taken this approach–especially if you work at such an institution–let me know.)
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