Open Education
"An open mind leaves a chance for someone to drop a worthwhile thought in it." Mark Twain
Just as envisioned by author Mark Twain, the premise and promise of open education (OE) included the "simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge” (Geser, 2012). But, OE moved beyond the conception of open with a focus on cognition, as Twain's quote suggested. Openly available technologies, education and scholarship are a “shared enterprise, a communal act” (Blomgren, 2018, p. 64). Weller (2014) described open education (see Figure 4) and suggested it has shifted from the periphery to mainstream academic practice. Over time, the term 'openness' shifted to mean many things when considered from an educational perspective, including “access, flexibility, equity, collaboration, agency, democratization, social justice, transparency, and removing barriers” (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020, p. 321).From this vision of OE emerged Wiley and Hilton's (2014) application of the five R's of reuse, revision, remixing, retention, and redistributing resources within pedagogical practices, and Wiley and Hilton's (2018) conception of OER-enabled pedagogy which shaped possible boundaries around the conception of how educators approach teaching from an open perspective. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2007) suggested that, beyond using OER, open education included “collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues … to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning” (The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, 2007, para 4).
The following conceptualization of open education defined my research work:
This description was presented in the UNESCO document Opening Up Education where a ten-dimensional framework outlined six core dimensions (access, content, pedagogy, recognition, collaboration, and research) supported by four transversal dimensions (strategy, technology, quality, and leadership) (Inamorato dos Santos et al., 2016). This framework was helpful in understanding the construct of open education since it is, and continues to be, a contested concept. A clearly defined boundary of open education was not possible, as posited by Pomerantz and Peek (2016), since more than fifty shades of open can be delineated by OE researchers and practitioners.Open education is a way of carrying out education, often using digital technologies. Its aim is to widen access and participation to everyone by removing barriers and making learning accessible, abundant, and customisable for all. It offers multiple ways of teaching and learning, building and sharing knowledge. It also provides a variety of access routes to formal and non-formal education, and connects the two (Inamorato dos Santos, 2019, p. 6).
Open education predated the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Noddings & Enright, 1983). OE research was not constrained or limited to digital resource production, digitally enabled teaching and learning, or electronic distribution of learning materials. However, for this research, digital was considered an essential component of open education. Cronin and MacLaren (2018) examined the extensive reach of open education conceptions to describe "not just policy, practices, resources, curricula and pedagogy, but also the values inherent within these, as well as relationships between teachers and learners" (p. 217). There were many conceptions, definitions, and visions for open education(see Figure 5). These are related to open educational resources (Bayne et al., 2015; Rolfe, 2012; Weller, 2014); open scholarship (Stewart, 2015; Veletsianos, 2015; Weller, 2016); the open education movement (Alevizou, 2015; Couros, 2006; Farrow, 2016; Rolfe, 2017); open pedagogies (Armellini & Nie, 2013; Hegarty, 2015; Paskevicius & Irvine, 2019; Wiley & Hilton, 2018); and open education practices (Couros, 2010; Cronin & MacLaren, 2018; Paskevicius, 2017; Roberts et al., 2018; Roberts, 2019; Stagg, 2017).
Although dominant research discourses examine open educational resources (OER), my research focuses on the transformative potential of OEPr, which is underrepresented in scholarly work, particularly in the field of teacher education (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018; Nascimbeni, 2018; Paskevicius, 2018; Roberts, 2019; Tur et al., 2020).
For clarification, I differentiate between open education practices using OEPr, rather than the usually applied acronym OEP which is commonly applied to both open pedagogies and open practices. In this way I hoped to add to the evolution of this term and provide clarity in naming this concept. In the next section I defined OER, explored a framework for open pedagogy, and elaborated on conceptions of OEPr.