A Quick Guide to Open Education
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Abbey K. Elder
When starting your work as an OER program manager, you’ll likely have a base of knowledge that affects the way you talk and think about open education. For this chapter, we are going to delve into what open education is and how the field has expanded over time to encompass pedagogies and practices which go far beyond open educational resources (OER) alone.
Background
“Open education is an idea, a set of content and a community which, properly leveraged, can help everyone in the world access free, high quality, open learning materials for the marginal cost of zero. We live in an age of information abundance where everyone, for the first time in human history, can potentially attain all the education they desire.” (Cable Green 2017)
Open education as we know it today is part of an ecosystem, a series of “open” movements that have coalesced around education, technology, and scholarly communication. Apart from open education, the most notable of these movements are open source, open access, and open science, the last of which is sometimes purported to be an umbrella term under which all other “opens” fall (de la Fuente, n.d.). Rather than fighting for a specific and limited definition, most of these movements have positioned themselves in opposition to what they define as “closed” ecosystems (Weller 2014). This can be seen in the ways that the open education and open source communities talk about their content, not under a strict ruler but under general guidelines. The “open source way,” for example, is described as a set of principles: transparency, collaboration, release early and often, inclusive meritocracy, and community (opensource.com, n.d.). Similarly, Wiley’s 5 R’s are a set of guidelines outlining what make OER “open.”
One of the first open movements to take hold on the internet was the open source community, whose proponents committed to releasing software under a license that enables remixing and reuse. This became an integral part of open education as well. However, many of the groups present in the early open education community focused on sharing content through their communities rather than software. As Bliss & Smith (2017) explain in their breakdown of the history of open education:
“much of our attention focused on OER’s usefulness at providing knowledge in its original form to those who otherwise might not have access. The implicit goal was to equalize access to disadvantaged and advantaged peoples of the world – in MIT’s language, to create ‘a shared intellectual Common.’” (p. 15)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s OpenCourseWare site, MIT OCW, gained national attention in 2001 when instructors began sharing their courseware and syllabi produced at the distinguished university. Although MIT OCW was certainly not the first major institutional initiative for open education, as the term “open education” had been used by instructors for decades before, MIT’s repository of res