Into the Labyrinth : A PhD Comprehensive Portfolio

Open Education

There are many conceptions, definitions, and visions for open education in relation to:
  1. open educational resources (Bayne, Knox, & Ross, 2015; Rolfe, 2012; Weller, 2014; Wiley, Bliss, & McEwen, 2014),
  2. open scholarship (Stewart, 2015; Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012; Weller, 2016),
  3. the open education movement (Alevizou, 2015; Bayne et al., 2015; Farrow, 2016; Noddings & Enright, 1983; Rolfe, 2017),
  4. open pedagogies (Armellini & Nie, 2013; Cronin & MacLaren, 2018; Ehlers, 2011; Hegarty, 2015), and
  5. open education practices (Couros, 2010; Paskevicius, 2017; Paskevicius & Irvine, 2019; Roberts, Blomgren, Ishmael, Graham, & Ferdig, 2018; Roberts, 2019; Stagg, 2017).
While the dominant research discourse focuses on open education resources, my research will focus on the transformative potential of OEPr, which is underrepresented in scholarly work, particularly in the field of education, (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018; Nascimbeni, 2018; Paskevicius, 2018; Roberts, 2019). For clarification, I have differentiated between open education practices using OEPr, rather than the usually used acronym OEP which is commonly applied to both open pedagogies and open practices. In this way I hope to add to the evolution to this term in current research.
     Open education includes 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). Through openly available technologies, education and scholarship are a “shared enterprise, a communal act” (Blomgren, 2018, p. 64). From this vision, the integration and application of the five R’s of reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute (Wiley & Hilton, 2018) into educational practices that include open educational resources is foundational to my research. The following conceptualization of open education frames my work.

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).

While this framing of open education suggests the use of digital technologies, this is not a necessary attribute for open education. 

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