Amber Thomas and I ran a session at the ALTC2012 conference entitled “Openness – Learning from our history”. Amber has already written about her reflections on the Digital Infrastructure team blog, and I’ll be capturing some more of my reflections after a similarly themed presentation at OpenEd with Sheila MacNeill of CETIS.
But the main point of the session, for me was to spark a discussion on where “open education” had been and where it might go. I had an (admittedly uncontentious) conception that the “open education” movement was a set of occasionally allied “strands” rather than a single unified idea – and I think the discussion proved that.
But you might be here for the langague…
Many delegates chose to describe (for me) fundamental issues with open educational practice with elision, as if they were a taboo word. So we had:
- The “f-word”: Funding
- The “a-word”: Academics
- The “p-words”: Policies and Pragmatics
- The “c-words”: Competencies and Confidence
- And the “b-word”: Business models
Now this may have been just a bit of a “conference LOL” meme, but I was surprised that so many of the things we have been talking about explicitly right the way through the UKOER are still seen as “things we don’t discuss”. For such a simple idea “putting stuff you use in teaching on the web to let others use it” has sparked a lot of different responses and initiatives, spiralling off in a number of (often contradictory) dimensions.
We’ve seen:
- the growth of online courses, harking back to the democratising learning through technology dreams of the late 90s.
- the advocates of usage data attempting to demonstrate the worth of openness.
- The advocates of large-scale formal repurposing (with roots in the c2002 reusable learning object model) sighing in despair at the “anarchistic” and wilfully diverse OER ecosystem.
But, at heart, the simple idea of OER is now established. It is quick, free and easy to make something and stick it on the web with a license. As one delegate put it: “Openness is the potential to do a lot with very little funding”. The costs – I am increasingly made aware – come with drawing it together and describing it.
With concerns around costs and business cases, many are beginning to grapple with questions of commercialisation. And much of the discussion concerned the obvious and unassailable tension between open ideals and commercial “reality”*. I don’t think anyone expects to see – in their lifetime – a world where all content is open, and there are many fascinating projects (PublishOER springs immediately to mind) that are engaged in understanding the interface between the paid- and free- content worlds.
Finance is also a big part of some strategies to capture the attention of institutional managers – again supporting the Wellerian “big OER” content-plus model of release. One delegate reminded us with such approaches comes the pressure to “compete with expert content providers”. And, naturally, it is needed to support the nascent “open online learning” movement, evidenced by the flurry of venture capital around big US start-ups.
There’s a danger in these “open silos” (as one delegate put it) of what I like to call “OER plus” initiatives that we lose the simple practicality of open release, and with it the simple message that it really is pretty damn awesome to share.
As UKOER3 funded work comes to an end there is a lot of interesting things to participate in. If you have an interest in the technology around OER, please do contribute to a forthcoming book “Into the Wild”.
* yes – there is a whole can of worms in that choice of word which I tried to unpack elsewhere.
