Buyer Beware: Openwashing and Higher Education in the Time of COVID
At the time of writing, it has been over 16 months since I physically shared an office with my colleagues. What began with a seemingly fleeting (and somewhat welcome) disruption to the norm — a break from dull, sweaty commutes, bad coffee and meetings in crowded committee rooms — suddenly became the new status quo. For instance, in a matter of days, the University of Manchester’s Undergraduate Medical Programme (MBChB), on which I had served as an administrator for over ten years, had reworked its teaching to the point where the major components of the curriculum could be delivered with a mixture of live webinars, online teaching sessions and pre-recorded lecture videos. Ultimately, the Programme survived the remainder of the academic year, but it became clear that the pandemic wasn’t going away and that the 2020–21 cohort would be expecting their online experience to be a lot slicker. The writing was on the wall not only for the MBChB Programme, but for the entire higher education (HE) sector, and it was clear that online learning was going to become an increasingly important method for the delivery of teaching in universities. The question was, in this vastly different landscape, how would HE institutions approach online teaching delivery and whose star would they hitch their wagon to when selecting the digital tools offered by various ed-tech companies?
The use of technology in education is nothing new — in fact, it has a long history, especially in HE. From The Open University’s use of television in the mid-to-late 20th Century to the “open content” model that emerged from the digital revolution, technology was initially intended to be used as a means of providing education as a public good rather than preserving it for the economically privileged. At the forefront of open source education was Moodle, established in 2002, which provided educators with a free tool to support learning in various digital forms. The fact that technology has allowed for the emergence of openness in education should be a cause for celebration but, as Martin Weller notes in his book The Battle For Open : How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory, rather than feeling any sense of vindication, advocates for open education have watched with growing concern as their concept has been repackaged by for-profit companies seeking to use “openness” as nothing more than a marketing tool. This strategy has become so prevalent that it is has earned a nickname: Openwashing.
What is openwashing?
As with the process of greenwashing — whereby companies convey a false impression that their products are environmentally friendly in order to boost sales and/or exposure — openwashing is a term coined in 2009 by Michelle Thorne to describe the strategy of disingenuously marketing products as open with little or nothing to back up the claim. Thorne gives the example of the “Be open. Be free. Be Berlin” marketing campaign, rolled out by Berlin Partner to promote the German capital, which allowed users to upload content which would then be openly available to the public. In reality, however, the terms of service revealed that users were forbidden to download and/or reproduce any content from the website, thus restricting anybody from doing anything with it. Hardly the utopia that proponents of openness have been striving towards. In an educational context, Audrey Watters wrote a blog post in 2015 in which she called out leading educational technology company Blackboard (used by multiple educational organisations, including the University of Manchester) following their acquisition of two open-source companies (Moodlerooms and Netspot), scoffing at Blackboard’s assertion that this was “no mere dalliance with open source”. Five years later, Blackboard sold Moodlerooms to Learning Technologies Group plc (LTG) for $31.7 million.
Defining openness
So, if openness doesn’t just mean being open to contributions, what exactly does it mean? The concept itself, as it pertains to education, has been defined in many different ways. David Wiley, a long-time advocate for open education, attempted to specify a rigid criteria for openness in 2007 by identifying the Four R’s of Open Content. Wiley argued that this criteria must be met in order to facilitate the following types of activity:
1. Reuse — Use the work verbatim, just exactly as you found it
2. Rework — Alter or transform the work so that it better meets your needs
3. Remix — Combine the (verbatim or altered) work with other works to better meet your needs
4. Redistribute — Share the verbatim work, the reworked work, or the remixed work with others
When one applies the “Four R’s” model to the aforementioned Berlin Partner example, it’s clear that the campaign doesn’t allow for any of these types of activities. If the content isn’t made available to the user then they don’t have the opportunity to reuse, rework, remix or redistribute the content in any way. Wiley’s “Four R’s” give us a useful roadmap, however, the educational landscape in 2007 could pretty much be summarised in a binary model: open vs closed. Open equals good and closed equals bad, right? However, now that openness is the norm, the ability to define what is and isn’t open becomes a lot more problematic. As Martin Weller pointed out in 2014: “It [the term ‘open’] is broad enough to be adopted widely, but also loose enough that anyone can claim it, so it becomes meaningless”. This characterisation, unfortunately, is what makes education ripe for the picking when it comes to openwashing.
The cautionary tale of MOOCs
Take the story of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) as an example. For decades, open education had been slowly evolving without much fanfare until 2001, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched its OpenCourseWare initiative with the aim of making learning materials from their courses freely available through the internet. OpenCourseWare was funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation on the premise that the materials would be “available for use as is, or for re-use as appropriate”, on the assertion that “limited resources and geography should not be barriers to an individual’s passion to learn” (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation OER Initiative) — a nobel mission statement if ever there was one. Many universities followed suit and, as the funding mainly came from charitable sources, there was little pressure for rapid impact or financial return, and so the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement rumbled on for another decade. It wasn’t until the arrival of MOOCs — entire courses freely available online — in the late 2000s that the open education movement really caught the attention of the media, and it wasn’t long before people smelled opportunity. By 2013, there were already several big players in the MOOC space — Coursera, Udacity and iVersity to name a few — all of which were either fully or partially funded by venture capitalists. As a result, MOOCs were no longer driven solely by social inclusion and innovation; they now had to satisfy investors by creating revenue, which necessitated a move away from the principles of openness. MOOC providers stopped making their content available for re-use, or allowing enrolments to be unrestricted, and swathes of material were hidden behind paywalls. All this to say that, when push comes to shove, openness is usually the first casualty of war. Also, as John Smith discussed in his OKHE1 blog post, the physical, educational and financial barriers that MOOCs still present make the “open learning” label seem questionable. Ultimately, when MOOC providers use the word “open” while no longer holding true to the basic principles of openness, there’s a strong argument to say that they are essentially openwashing. As David Wiley said of Udacity’s creation of the Open Education Alliance, “If permitting anyone and everyone to watch their videos and read their materials for free — without granting 4R permissions like those granted by the CC BY license — makes Udacity and their partners deserving of the moniker ‘Open Education Alliance’, then CNN and the BBC should be the ‘Open News Alliance’ and Pandora and Spotify should be the ‘Open Music Alliance.’”
The threat of openwashing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic
So, why is openwashing in education such a concern at this particular point in time? Well, as we have seen over the past year and a half, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on the education sector; affecting schools, colleges and universities alike. As of April 2020, over 1.2 billion adults and children across 186 countries had been affected by school and university closures, which necessitated a move from in-person to online learning. Universities had decided to move their teaching online, and they continued to deliver their teaching in this way for the remainder of the academic year. As it became clear that the pandemic wasn’t going to blow over in time for the 2020–21 academic year, universities scrambled to find online solutions and commercial publishers increasingly shifted their business models to focus on digital courseware, and here’s where universities ran the risk of leaving themselves vulnerable to companies that were looking to sell themselves as open while, in reality, caring more about profits and data collection. Recent events have shown that, in times of crisis, sometimes institutions reach for the quick solution rather than the correct solution (the UK government’s test and trace app fiasco, anybody?) and, as Jesse Stommel points out, “quite often, for-profit ed-tech companies take advantage of this situation [the bureaucratic grey area at educational institutions when it comes to learning technology] through predatory marketing tactics — pitching their tools to the most powerful, least knowledgeable folks at an institution”. In other words, unscrupulous companies tend to circumvent educators and IT experts at universities and instead bamboozle uninformed senior managers with impressive sales pitches.
Another reason that openwashing is such a concern in the wake of the pandemic is that students could well be tempted away from the traditional university model altogether, enticed by seductive sales pitches from ed-tech companies like Udacity. After all, why would students pay tens of thousands of pounds to get an online education from The University of X, Y or Z when they could sign up to Udacity’s so-called “open platform”? If that turns out to be the case, such online learning providers will be poised to snatch up the prospective students who are disillusioned with the traditional university model, leaving thousands of people vulnerable to not-so-open learning. A report produced by the Office for Students (OfS) in February 2021 stated that only 21% of teachers said they were “very confident” that they had the skills to design and deliver digital teaching and learning, whereas 49% of students said they were “very confident” that they had the skills to benefit from online learning. These findings suggest that there is a gap between the confidence of teachers to competently deliver content online and the students’ belief that they have the ability to learn from online delivery. Additionally, there is no clear evidence that in-person teaching leads to significantly better outcomes so, if there’s an appetite for online learning that traditional universities are unable to supply, there is a multitude of online learning providers who are ready to step in and fill the void.
To many people, this may seem like unnecessary hand-wringing, however, although the pandemic is (hopefully) on its way out and more teaching will be returning to traditional face-to-face delivery, things will almost certainly never go back to the 2019 version of normal when it comes to the delivery of teaching at universities. The aforementioned OfS report stated that “The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly accelerated the digital strategies of many HE providers, with some reporting that projects or developments that were expected to take several years had been achieved in just a matter of weeks”, so institutions were never planning to put the toothpaste back in the tube following a return to campus. Students and educators alike should be especially concerned by the assertion that several years’ worth of work has been crammed into a matter of weeks. Decisions and plans on digital strategies that would otherwise have been made with far more consideration were turned around in a fraction of the time, so one has to wonder what kind of shortcuts have been taken.
The (potentially) good news
All that being said, there are already signs that global organisations are aware of these issues and are making moves towards ensuring that open source technologies are made available for teachers and students. UNESCO’s International Commission on the Futures of Education released a report in 2020 with “Nine Ideas for Public Action” in education in a post-COVID world, the sixth of which was to create “free and open source technologies for teachers and students”, which is immensely encouraging for those who are concerned about for-profit ed-tech companies hijacking HE. I will now quote directly from the report as I don’t believe I can express the point quite as eloquently:
“Public education cannot be defined and controlled by content and methods built outside of the pedagogical space and outside of the human relationships between teachers and students. The forced scramble for materials and platforms that we have seen during the pandemic poses a great risk to the teaching profession and its autonomy and could have serious consequences for the futures of education. We must ensure that any digital transition is not just an effort pushed by technology companies but that teachers, students, governments, civil society representatives and privacy advocates are also represented and shape these transformations.”
In addition, The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) has set up an Open Covid Pledge for Education, which encourages institutions to commit to “make [their] intellectual property openly and freely available to the world to support educators, students and decision-makers, to help educational organisations survive and thrive, and to build a fairer and more resilient education system”, primarily by pledging “where possible — to openly license or dedicate to the public domain [their] intellectual property”. The pledge currently has over 200 signatories from institutional representatives, including big names such as Moodle, University College London, The Open University, the University of Warwick and the University of Glasgow, as well as many other organisations around the world. The fact that the ALT namechecks the UNESCO report on its FAQ page suggests that the message is indeed spreading to the people at major institutions who are in position to make the necessary decisions.
Another encouraging piece of news is that Jisc (a non-profit institute for HE support in the UK) published a report (originally in March 2020, then again in November 2020 to incorporate the radical change to the educational landscape) addressing the issue of whether ed-tech startup companies can solve the challenges faced by UK universities. Over 50 senior decision-makers in HE were interviewed for this report and some common priorities were pin-pointed — the most important of which was “Delivering the best, most equitable student experience”. The report also stated that senior leaders recognised that “Any change in a university’s physical or digital infrastructure will only succeed if it’s accepted by the staff, academics and students who are affected”. If this report is an indicator of how decision-makers at HE institutions will actually behave in the face of potential technological solutions, the signs are positive.
Moving forward
In conclusion, it’s fair to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has flipped most industries on their heads, and HE is no exception. However, as with many other sectors, to pretend that we weren’t already trending towards a rise in digital solutions would be disingenuous. The direction towards online delivery isn’t the concerning factor, however, rather it’s the speed at which the HE sector has moved during the pandemic that should be ringing alarm bells. The need for quick solutions when it came to online delivery potentially left HE institutions vulnerable to opportunistic ed-tech companies and whether or not this has led to poor decisions remains to be seen. It is, however, encouraging to see recent reports suggesting that decision-makers in HE institutions are aware of the need to maintain a healthy degree of scepticism when faced with crucial decisions about the future of HE as we know it. When all is said and done, one thing remains certain: students now have more options than ever before and they will be voting with their feet.
