Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Because of the 85th anniversary of the ICDE this year, Aras Bozkurt (editor of Openpraxis) invited several people active in Open Education for a small contribution for a collective editorial in Open Praxis. This was my contribution, structured along three questions.
Why is openness in education important and why is it necessary at this moment?
The current period is characterised by major challenges. The global climate crisis, a growing number of refugees in Europe, an ageing population in Europe, but also increasing disinformation and, especially since the COVID pandemic, a growth in numbers of followers of conspiracy theories. International cooperation, at all levels, and an adequately educated population are necessary prerequisites to tackle these challenges effectively. In doing so, exchange of knowledge and information should not be a barrier. All this argues in favour of open education, more specifically adoption of open educational resources, because it breaks down both barriers to knowledge exchange and barriers to access to high-quality learning materials.
What are the fundamental values and guiding philosophies of openness in education?
Article 26.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads
“Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.”
It is this article that is the fundament for openness in education. This requires both an approach of education as a public good that serves humanitarian values, next to the approach as viewing education having a more utilitarian, economic values (Sloep & Schuwer, 2016). Open education, and more specifically OER, are ideally suited to shaping education from the humanitarian values approach. E.g., the 5R rights of OER makes localizing and providing a voice to minorities easier.
What are the drawbacks and challenges associated with openness in education?
Challenges for adoption of (forms of) Open Education are manifold. When focusing on OER, being an important element of Open Education, the most recent challenge is the rise of Gen-AI, where ChatGPT is most visible. Although citing sources is still an issue, the tool is improving rapidly. This gives great opportunities for rapid on-the-fly creation of learning materials. However, this may lead to less sharing and reuse of OER, which means, for example, that innovations in education and learning materials are less likely to be shared. This has the risk of leading to impoverishment in the supply of learning materials. In addition, to safeguard the humanitarian values approach, more openness is needed in the data used to feed these tools.
Reference
Sloep, P. B., & Schuwer, R. (2016). Of two contrasting philosophies that underpin openness in education and what that entails. In M. Deimann & M. A. Peters (Eds.), The philosophy and theory of open education. 83-100. New York: Peter Lang Publishing (preprint)