How would I respond to the provocation.... "All Education should be Open Education”?
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Q. Should all education be open education?
A. In an ideal world, yes. Why would we decide to put barriers up against this?
Positives of open education
- Anyone can sign up from anywhere
- Little barrier to entry or cost to participate (maybe access to IT, internet speed, etc.)
- Offers the possibility of Lifelong Learning
Problems for open education
- Always going to be a finite level of resources needed in order to run. Where do you find those resources to keep going? There are limitations of language, number of people available to teach or provide a level of contact and so on.
- Some education requires prerequisites to be taken for good reason. Or, in the case of professional training, requires specific levels of outcome in order to join an association (such as in medicine or education).
- There is a large dropout or non-participation rate. A paper in the British Journal of Education Technology lists participant completion rates in MOOCs as ‘typically in the range of 3–10%’ (Rieber, 2017).
When we look at a lot of the issues of Open Education they mirror those of commons. One of the most persistent arguments for commons resources is whether they should truly be open to everyone, or if they can be community based and directed.
There generally is an understanding today that actually commons should be created in relation to a need, and therefore the creation of a resource is most likely to be successful and be available in perpetuity if it is created with a specific community in mind.
If we consider OERs in the same way, then we should ask the question ‘who is the community that you wish to create your educational resource for?’ When you know the answer to this and have identified a community, you can begin to plan for their needs. It is possible that others from outside that community will still be able to participate, but knowing your audience is something which allows you to make key decisions on resourcing your project.
What do you need to set up an OER?
- Surplus labour to create and manage the resource. In your case this labour is finite, but you have access to a group of people with time available because you are students and you have elected to volunteer this time to your own education.
- Resources such as technology and web hosting. Hopefully you already have a computer and an internet connection to participate in the course anyway. Web hosting will use free existing online resources, and some from the University itself.
- Knowledge of what your intended community might need from you in order to plan other parts of your resourcing. If, for example, you intend to make this resource available to people from other countries, do you have the facility to translate some of it into other languages?