Into the Labyrinth : A PhD Comprehensive Portfolio

Open Education

     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).

Open education predates digital technologies (Noddings & Enright, 1983). Open education is not constrained or limited to digital resource production, digitally enabled teaching and learning, or electronic distribution of learning materials. However, for this research, digital is a primary component of open education. Cronin and MacLaren (2018) posit 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). That being said, 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 differentiated 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 hope to add to the evolution to this term in current research. I will next define OER, explore a framework for open pedagogy, and elaborate on conceptions of OEPr. 
 

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