Open Education and Open Pedagogy
Open Education is a set of ideals and practices describing educational systems based on unrestricted sharing and collaboration between students and teachers and facilitated by the internet and Creative Commons licensing. On the internet, the cost of distribution of materials is as close to zero as it will ever be, and the sharing and generation of knowledge made possible by this fact opens the doors for new pedagogical practices that may have wide-reaching implications. As more information becomes more freely available on more diverse topics, the job of universities will no longer be to function as safes from which one can exclusively withdraw knowledge; they must be centres to guide students through knowledge, connect them to other knowers, and assist in application of knowledge. Open Education, through its emphasis on knowledge generation and connectivity, embraces this shift in purpose.
Open Education has two components: Open Educational Pedagogy, and Open Educational Resources. Open Educational Pedagogy (OEP) is the theory and practice of Open Education. One aim of OEP is to centre students as knowledge creators by deemphasizing disposable assignments in favour of renewable assignments. Disposable assignments are the current educational norm. They are created by students and handed to a teacher, who gives the assignment a grade and some comments. The student then gets the assignment back, possibly reads those comments, and either throws it away or buries it in a folder somewhere, subsequently moving on and often forgetting about the whole thing. This structure of assignment has the potential to create insightful work, and, if well-designed, perhaps impart long-lasting learning on a student, but it also lends itself to a feeling of pointlessness, creating detailed, high effort content just so it can be judged and discarded. A renewable assignment is any work that is intended to contribute to a larger accessible body of knowledge after the assessment is complete. In this article, David Wiley explains the concept further, offers some examples of renewable assignments, and outlines the shift in educational philosophy that they inhabit. This is just one way that OEP leads education to openness, alongside encouraging educators to make their materials freely available to reuse, recreate, and redistribute. Below is an article by Miranda Dean outlining her first experiences with an open pedagogy class and how it challenged her preconceived notions of learning and led to a stronger sense of understanding and purpose in her educational experience.
The Roles of OERs and Open Licensing
It’s hard to teach without a textbook; an Open Pedagogical practice requires Open Pedagogical materials. This is where Open Educational Resources (OERs) come in. OERs are materials like videos, textbooks, podcasts, or interactive games that are publically available not only to access but to redistribute in altered forms for the purpose of catering to particular students, languages or educational settings. Resources that have limited availability and limited ability to be edited and redistributed add inflexibility to the educational process which can be damaging to the accessibility of courses built on top of them, mandating that, in order to achieve the potential of Open Education, OERs be as unrestricted in engagement as possible. This free resource sharing is facilitated by Creative Commons Licences, which can be used to offer up a work as a part of a shared creative commons in our culture, granting it varying levels of restriction ranging from essentially none at all to more restrictive demands against redistributing the work in an edited form or for commercial gain. One example of OERs are the output of the renewable assignments previously discussed. Below is a video by Dr. Jessica Kruger recounting how she assigned a class to collectively write a textbook on the course material and how it engaged students and created work that future students would be able to access and benefit from. Without OERs to take advantage of the low redistribution cost allowed by the advent of the internet age, Open Education would have no place in our culture. The more unrestricted the access to knowledge, the more open our education can be.
Challenges and Solutions
Renewable assignments have a number of issues that tie into larger problems with Open Education. Many relate to whether or not renewable assignments will ever actually become renewed assignments. Looking for information in a repository of student work will likely not be desirable to those with access to more authoritative databases, seeing that trust in student work is generally low. This has rooting in a banker model of education where teachers know everything and students know nothing, but is not wholly illegitimate. In any setting where the barrier to entry is relatively low, information that is spread must be highly scrutinised. It cannot be trusted with certainty that a citation in the work of a first year music education undergraduate student taking a science elective says what the student says that it says, whether out of a lack of competence, time, or effort, and not all instructors interrogate every claim in the hundreds of assignments they mark. Even instructor-produced work released as OER does not necessarily meet a guaranteed standard of scrutiny that you could expect from an academic journal. That being said, you don’t need to look that far to find nonsense claims in said academic journals which later need to get retracted, like the Lancet article that suggested a connection between MMR vaccines and autism and the paper published by Frontiers with conspicuous and absurd AI images of rat testicles. If anything, the potential unreliability of student-produced work should bring into focus the fact that we should always be critically interrogating claims made in work published anywhere, no matter how authoritatively they are made.
In addition to trust issues there would be issues with discoverability. Wholesale adaptation of open pedagogy would create an enormous amount of student produced work which anyone looking for information on a topic would need to sift through. The society we currently live in, and are showing no sign of moving away from, is one where digital sharing is overwhelmingly algorithmically driven. Because of this, the student produced work intended to be renewable would need to be sorted through in some way by a system that brings those deemed worthwhile to the top of the pile. Any way of doing this would inherit many of the problems causing misinformation and driving the potentially harmful form of content on social media today. Highest view count at the top incentivizes academic clickbait, where an outrageous title not representative of the article would succeed, highest engagement at the top would incentivize the production of the most controversial research possible, a poor setting for rigorous work, best rated or most cited at the top would enforce popular views and punish dissent. The algorithm that determines the visibility of work and the people who create and maintain that algorithm would be given enourmous power over the flow of knowledge in an Open Educational setting, and we could never be certain that that power would be used effectively or responsibly. The video below outlines many of the values and challenges of Open Pedagogy, but also offers a discussion of the harm in bringing the function of the public internet into education.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to Open Education is how it challenges our deeply held notions of ownership. Much has been discussed recently on the subject of the Myth of Barter, elaborated on in the video below. It was the previous assumption of economists that before money was invented, people traded by bartering. If you, the hunter, needed a shirt from the tailor, you would give him some of your meat in exchange for some of his clothes. Though intuitive, this, when further explored, leads to loads of inefficiencies and assumes a high level of immediate transactionality in pre-money relationships that has never been seen in emerging or pre-contact civilizations today. What is in fact seen is more like an “I’ll get the next one” economy. The hunter gives the tailor some meat when he’s hungry because the tailor is his neighbour and quite likely his friend, and he knows that when he is in need the tailor will help him in return. A Hedonist might point out that these situations are fundamentally the same, in each case one giving so that they may benefit themselves. A key difference, however, is that in a barter economy one gives just enough so that they can take just enough in a mutually beneficial but fundamentally adversarial relationship in which each participant is looking for the best deal. In the latter case, one gives because giving freely elevates everyone and strengthens and represents the strength of the community. For all of its potential flaws, the knowledge sharing at the centre of Open Education turns digital pedagogy into an “I’ll get the next one” economy. It returns educational practice to the principles of untied cooperation that are the core of communal living as humans, disrupting the current locked-down internet and working towards truly democratising knowledge. By giving up possessive tendencies we have been trained into through a larger system of strict ownership, Open Education encourages us to be a community first, giving everyone a reason to contribute and moving society forward without the arbitrary scarcity of limited access in the digital age.