Open is as open does

I fear this post will come across as rushed and disjointed, because I have more thoughts I want to express than available time to express them.  But Simon McIntyre’s response to my post on Expanding the Role of the University has really got me to thinking.

To paraphrase in brief, Simon argues that my philosophical idealism may be nice, but in practice the demand for the informal sorts of opportunities that I initially proposed is not really all that high.  He sites his experiences with the ‘COFA Online Enrich’ program as an example of this.

I must say that my own experiences have not been all that different to his, which is what has got me to thinking.

If you build it, they don’t always come…

When I first came to UNSW I was involved in a fairly expensive, highly ambitious project called the Learning Resources Catalogue (later rebranded as the Learning Resources Community), which aimed to foster sharing and reuse amongst an international cohort of educators and institutions.  We invested countless hours into the development of the underlying platform as well as trying to get people to use it – but ultimately the project failed to gain any substantial uptake whatsoever and was shelved after several years.

I took several important lessons away from this experience.

First and foremost, that sharing and reuse are not necessarily seen as valuable by everyone.  Some see no use in it whatsoever; others don’t understand why you do it; for others still, the idea of sharing is highly undesirable and contrary to notions that are valued and protected, namely that of intellectual property.

Herein lay my primary criticism with the view that open education is only about open courseware.  In my experience this is insufficient, far too narrow, and importantly, unsustainable as well.  When open education is seen to be an output or the end product, rather than an integral component to the learning and teaching processes it becomes an add-on – distinctly separate from and in addition to.  As a result open courseware begins to carry additional requirements and resourcing that do not necessarily benefit or feed back into the wider institution.

The LRC is a prime example here.  It was not embedded in learning and teaching practice; it was quite clearly separate from that.  So separate in fact that many staff in the community it was developed in saw no use for it, and questioned why it was being funded.

Open Process, not Open Output

So it would seem to me then, that instead of focusing on open output we instead need to emphasise open process.

In order for open education to achieve sustainability, and indeed realise its ultimate value, it needs to be embedded in practice, and be expanded to include the learning process rather than the simply artifacts of the process.  Then, even if there is minimal interaction by informal learners (or others) it won’t matter, because the process of open education will have an inherent value to the parties involved regardless of whether it proves useful to everyone else.

So what do I mean by that exactly.  Well, for starters I believe we need to stop focusing on the nebulous notions of sharing and reuse and start emphasizing the human ties that are the most important element of open education – the connections between real people and the resulting networks they form.

Then, when open education becomes a process through which we interact, engage and contribute, sharing and reuse occur as a natural by product.

Personal Learning Environments

I’ve spoken ad inifinitum about the importance of the learner owning their own experiences using their own personal learning environments (PLEs), where they control the spaces and places in which they learn and interact – according to what works best for them, not what works best for the course.

And yet inherent to the underlying structures of most web applications today are methods of organising information – particularly RSS – in a manner that does not deteriorate the data.  Therefore this need not be a decision between either course spaces or personal spaces – you can have both.

By necessity though institutions – and indeed the learners themselves – will need to come up with a system of drawing the information together, and beginning to make sense out of it.

Some of this organisation will take place using tools like RSS aggregators, feed readers; filtering and searching mechanisms like Google Alerts, or more sophisticated services like Yahoo! Pipes.  Equally likely, it may take the form of learning networks – of loosely joined collectives and connectives of people – each of whom share similar interests or goals and examine the information, topics and themes in their own way using their own lenses.

With these distributed systems in place, learners of all types can begin to interact with curricula in whatever form and manner they please – formally vs informally enrolled; actively engaged versus  passive consuming; long term enthusiast versus casual, temporary perusal – and the underlying structures of RSS will help facilitate the process.

Transparency and Visibility

What is required for this system to work though – for information to flow most quickly and people to locate and identify peers most easily – is that the information be publicly visible.  That it be open.

Herein lay the crucial distinction in the conversation about informal opportunities for learners.  When open education equates solely to open courseware, not only there are additional requirements above and beyond the scope of a course or a curriculum – learning and teach are somehow distinctly separate from the resources.  When open education is an output, the output is static and passive.

However when open education is embedded in practice, and the learning and teaching process is characterised by a distributed, free flowing system of content and engagement between students, instructors, and anyone else who cares to participate, the process becomes far more dynamic, evolving and more self-sustaining.