From open access to open science—Open education in transition

It is arguable that the creation of open universities around the middle of the 20th century had a lot to do with the development of the idea of open education. Most influential among these institutions has been the United Kingdom Open University (https://www.open.ac.uk/). The creation of these educational institutions was driven by a socioeconomic and political agenda targeted at widening access to educational opportunities especially to marginalized groups. These included those who may have been unable to access educational opportunities because of a lack of resources or requisite entry qualifications, or simply because of their inability to get to where education was being provided (Wedemeyer, 1981). Being open—as opposed to being closed—therefore meant that foremost, teaching could be taken closer to where the students were located; additionally, that their inability to pay for the tuition, or their lack of entry qualifications, would not be a barrier to access.

These initiatives—radical at the time—laid the foundations of open, flexible, and distance learning (OFDL) with which we are now very familiar. But more importantly, they provided the ideal breeding ground for critical reflection upon the foundations of these nontraditional approaches to educational provision. These included principles and practices around equity and equality of educational opportunity. In one of the most notable of these commentaries—“Open Learning, Distance Learning and the Misuse of Language”—Greville Rumble (1989), planning officer of the United Kingdom Open University at the time, offered one of the earliest definitions and critical insights on the criteria of open. These comprised criteria related to access, which has to do with an individual’s ability to enroll in a program of study regardless of their age, occupation, financial condition, and prior knowledge or qualifications; place and pace of study, which is about being able to study anywhere, anytime, and at a pace of one’s own choosing; means, which has to do with choices in relation to modes and methods of study including choice of media; program structure, which refers to choices in relation to learning goals, subject matter, and assessment activities; and support services, which is about access to choices in relation to the range of support services, and where, when, and how they are provided.

Simply put—and according to these criteria—open education is about affording learners as much openness and flexibility as possible. As such, openness is a value proposition—a public good, and a desirable goal regardless of one’s context or ideological persuasion. At pains to distinguish the idea of open, and open learning from distance education, Rumble (1989, p. 33) argued that there can be no such thing as an “open-learning-system (noun) as opposed to an open (adjective) learning-system.” He also argued that while the existence of the latter is not contested, as any institution that satisfied some or all of open learning criteria could be considered an open learning-system, it does not follow that there can be an open-learning-system as a mode of educational provision. However, distance education can: it is a mode of educational provision that may adopt different degrees of openness and closure. In fact, distance education, along with its predecessor—correspondence education—is one of the earliest manifestations of openness and flexibility. But with the growth of online learning, we now have several other modes of open and flexible learning, including blended learning (where face-to-face contact is combined with online learning), hybrid learning (where online and face-to-face modes are combined to allow learners to be either physically colocated or online), and hyflex learning (where hybrid or blended approaches are combined in arrangements that give learners the option of attending sessions in the classroom, participating online, or both).

On the 50th anniversary this year of the founding of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia (ODLAA), it seems appropriate that we take the time to revisit and reflect upon the idea of open, which is the heart and soul of this organization. ODLAA was established in 1973 as the Australian and South Pacific External Studies Association to support and advance the cause of external studies (to be called “distance education” later on), in Australia and the Southwest Pacific region (see Bewley, 2008; Inglis, 1999; Smith, 1984). A call for expressions of interest to this special themed issue resulted in several insightful contributions—comprising both conceptual pieces as well as those with practical applications of the principles of openness and flexibility.

In one of the seminal pieces, “Fifty Years of Open Education Policy and Practice in Australia,” Terry Evans and Viktor Jakupec provide a comprehensive account of the development of ODLAA and the trajectory that external studies took, not only in this geographical context but also globally. This contribution describes the 1970s and the 1980s as a period of enlightenment—a renaissance if you like—for all forms of OFDL. Around this time, as Evans and Jakupec point out, significant developments around the theoretical constructs of OFDL were being articulated by key commentators. The term correspondence education was being realized as an inadequate descriptor of open and flexible learning as a comprehensive and rigorous form of educational practice. And while many more open universities were emerging across the globe, growing numbers of conventional educational institutions—in recognizing its potential for widening participation—were also adopting OFDL alongside their campus-based teaching and turning into dual-mode operations.

These were also testing times for OFDL, as it naturally got compared with more established campus-based models of learning and teaching. A strong argument in favor of OFDL was that it enabled learners in remote locations, as well as those in employment and with other commitments, to pursue their education and training with minimal fuss, although this meant that OFDL, because of its minimalist form, could not be fairly compared with the educational experience on campus with all its richness and flavor. In their article, Evans and Jakupec describe how leading commentators on the practice attempted to address that parity of esteem between the two modes, to highlight the specific role of OFDL in widening access but also promote it as a comprehensive form of educational practice which could be no less rigorous than the campus-based experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic altered the dynamics of that controversy completely. Institutions with any reservations about the effectiveness of OFDL were left with no choice but to shut down their campus-based operations and adopt some form of OFDL as an emergency response with no apologies. It will be interesting to see—as Evans and Jakupec point out—if having been through this experience, educational institutions will try to incorporate greater levels of openness and flexibility in their business models or revert to conventional practices and operations.

The article “Open Education in Closed-Loop Systems: Enabling Closures and Open Loops” by Michael Gallagher and James Lamb explores the challenges and the possibilities of any such transition. Taking higher education in the United Kingdom as their reference point, Gallagher and Lamb explore the likelihood of any such transformation of existing institutional choreographies. They argue that university systems tend to maintain what they call “prohibitive closures that constitute a closed-loop system: opaque academic practices, control of what counts as knowledge, financial and social exclusion, and the perpetuation of privilege” while simultaneously holding up education—all along—as a public good and as a vehicle for socioeconomic mobility. Any move toward the adoption of the idea of open education within these closed-loop systems is entwined in this tension between what they call “prohibitive” and “enabling closures.” To be able to achieve any traction in this context, openness and flexibility must be deliberate and designed, with policies, practices, and operations that not only look good on the books but are followed up with concrete strategies and measures to support the socialization, buy-in, and adoption of open educational practices.

In the article “Transcending Post-Truth: Open Educational Practices in the Information Age,” Michael Glassman, Shantanu Tilak, and Min Ju Kang describe this kind of deliberate practice as stretching beyond widening access to educational opportunity, and open and flexible learning, to include what these researchers describe as the design and development of “ecologically grounded pedagogies through an open source educational processes framework focusing on productive many-to-many online communication and community formation, offering practical examples of open source educational processes curricula implemented in a higher education setting.”

As we saw in Greville Rumble’s definition and criteria of open, this dimension of the idea of openness was inconceivable 30 years ago. It has only become possible in the last 2 decades with the growth of liberative technologies such as the Internet and the Web, and artificial intelligence tools more recently. There are of course now many more examples of the power and potential of such open-source tools and educational processes. A powerful example is offered in the article “Toward Self-Directed Learning: How do Nepali Adolescents learn with MOOCs?” by Zixi Li, Meina Zhu, Dilnoza Kadirova, and Curtis Bonk. MOOCs emerged about a decade ago as examples of the kinds of ecologically grounded pedagogies with opportunities for the many-to-many communication and open-source educational processes that Glassman et al. are talking about. In this article, Li et al. describe how, by simply opening up access to learning opportunities, and community-based learning designs, MOOCs have improved the lives and livelihoods of learners with limited to no access to educational opportunities locally, let alone anything from Ivy League educational institutions.

Li et al. suggest moreover that while motivation, metacognition, and self-regulation are important determinants of persistence and success in such open-ended pedagogical designs, they are not enough. Careful design, scaffolding, and orchestration of the student learning experience is critical. In the article “Understanding College Students’ Achievement Goals toward using Open Educational Resources from the Perspective of Expectancy–Value Theory,” Hengtao Tang, Yan Yang, and Yu Bao suggest that learners are unlikely to adopt a resource or strategy if they did not see any advantage or value in it—that is, its expectancy value. If the adoption of open educational resources (OER) is not aligned with their learning and achievement goals, they are unlikely to engage with it, and unlikely to adopt OER only because they might be cheaper or free. However, they will be more likely to adopt and use OER for their pedagogical value—which is why attention to pedagogical design is even more critical in open-ended and community-based learning environments.

Careful orchestration of models like these that celebrate equity, diversity, and inclusion require not only time to develop but a similar investment of effort and resources to maintain and scale out. In the article “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Open Education: A Systematic Literature Review,” Francisco Iniesto and Carina Bossu offer an update on key concerns and issues in the conversation around these topics. Their review suggests that in order to advance and scale out the cause of open education, there is a need for broader consultation among key stakeholders—not just faculty members and students but senior administrators as well, because the practice of open education requires shifts in both academic as well as institutional choreographies and mindsets. Shifts in institutional mindsets require a reimagination of the foundations, and value propositions of education, because without this kind of a shift, core operational models will be hard to change.

An example of such a shift in mindsets and operational models across multiple systems and operations, and across jurisdictions is offered in the experience of the development of “The Open Master: A new Model of Transnational Higher Education” by Simon Goorney, Matoula Sarantinou, and Jacob Sherson. And in the article “From Open Education to Open Learning: The Experience at the National Autonomous University of Mexico,” Larisa Enríquez-Vázquez and Myrna Hernández-Gutiérrez describe how such shifts might be possible within single systems and operations with the example of the open university system at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Academic mindsets, on the other hand, have to do with a reconsidered approach to scientific inquiry which adopts a more enlightened view of what constitutes knowledge and intellectual property, and how it is created, curated, and disseminated. As pointed out in the article “Are We close(d)? Debating the Openness Paradox in Science” by Benjamin Heurich and Bence Lukács, the practice of open science does not mean that all scientific inquiry is out there in the open for everyone, and anyone to observe and perhaps influence. It is about looking at scientific activity through new lenses—as a public good, the products of which need to be shared as widely as possible—with appropriate safeguards of course, to protect human rights, confidentiality, intellectual property, personal information, and sacred indigenous rights, and knowledge.

Clearly, the idea of open is neither new nor static. It is, in fact, very much a living and breathing idea, as Serpil Koçdar, Aras Bozkurt, Hasan Uçar, Abdulkadir Karadeniz, Erdem Erdoğdu, and Som Naidu suggest in their article “Openness in Education as a Living Idea: A longitudinal Investigation of its Growth and Development.” From a study of the primary literature on open education, these researchers trace the development of the idea of open from its primary focus around widening access to educational opportunity, and the adoption of open learning and teaching strategies, to the practice of open scholarship—which refers to the adoption of a culture of openness. Some of the nuances associated with its practice such as the use of free and open-source software and OER have become possible only recently due to the affordances of new technologies over the past couple of decades, while others, such as the practice of open science, are being influenced by global sustainable development agenda such as poverty reduction, global literacy, and education for all.

Education is a great leveler—a source for freedom and justice, for without education, one can never be truly free. Freedom is a lot more than being able to have a voice. It is about having the tools to be able to make choices about one’s life and livelihoods—which even wealth, at times, cannot enable. But for education to reach the poorest of the poor, it needs to break out of the shackles of privilege and become accessible more openly, freely, and flexibly. Unless we embrace this disposition as a collective, our development goals for a more equitable future will remain aspirational.