Can we enhance the quality of teaching through the lens of open?
In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published virtually all of its educational material from its undergraduate and postgraduate courses on the web via the MIT Open Courseware (MIT OCW) platform. Its philosophy was a simple one:
to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone
The stats are incredible. Today there are materials from 2400 courses and the site has received over 300 million visitors. That’s the 5th best university in the world giving away almost its entire learning materials for free. This is in direct contrast to every university I have worked at that keeps learning materials under the lock and key of a virtual learning environment (VLE).
I think the first question here is why? Why would one of the world’s top universities decide to give away their content away freely? Secondly, why have other universities not followed in their footsteps? And thirdly, could open play a role in enhancing the quality of teaching within universities, which could positively impact on students, staff and wider society?
Why?
It’s important to ask this question in the context of the time that MIT OCW was created. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rapid growth of the Internet(by users) created a paradigm shift in the fabric of society as new worlds opened up in our very homes although, as this clip shows, it was still not fully understood how the Internet would completely and fundamentally change our lives. During that period, parts of the education sector had already started to respond to this paradigm shift through using Internet technologies to deliver courses and communicate more effectively through email and discussion forums. However, it was still a period of uncertainty as to how the Internet would impact on the whole sector. During this period of rapid change, MIT took a unique decision. That is, instead of using the Internet to make money from distance learning, they would publish its learning materials on the web, for free, using open licences. This, they felt, was more in tune with their own mission statement:
to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century
For someone working in higher education in 2018, this open approach to sharing learning materials seems like a completely alien concept (excepting small pockets of cross-sector innovation such as the Jisc App and Resource Store in the UK and MERLOT in the US). However, on an institutional level, it seems to be non-existent. There has been a shift towards making university learning materials more accessible to the world via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). However, I am inclined to agree with a former OKHE student that MOC might be a more appropriate acronym as it is questionable in the lens of MIT OCW whether MOOCs can really be called open at all. Even though MOOCs appear to be making university learning materials openly available to all, there has been a shift in recent years to monetise MOOCs through running courses on a closed platform that you need to log into, waiting for the next run of the course and making payment to retain access to the course after the run has ended or to gain a certificate.
So what drives MIT to the commitment in making their learning materials open in an increasingly closed world? And who benefits? Social responsibility is certainly a driving factor to MIT OCW. By 2021, MIT hope to reach a billion minds to:
bridge the global gap between human potential and opportunity, so that motivated people everywhere can improve their lives and change the world.
The potential reach of open learning materials has changed the lives of countless students, educators and independent learners. It seems like the question of making learning resources open is a question of ‘why not’ rather than ‘why’.
What are the barriers to embracing open learning materials?
So why haven’t other universities followed in MIT’s footsteps? Is it a top-down reluctance or a bottom-up resistance? What are the intersecting political, cultural and economic barriers to embracing open learning materials? From my research I have identified 5 areas that has an impact on the buy-in of academics and institutions on making learning materials open.
Time
When it comes to implementing change, ‘time’ is always right up there as a barrier. In my previous post on the benefits of open CPD for staff development in higher education, ‘time’ was the main barrier to academic engagement with technology enhanced learning (TEL)staff development. Gregory’s paper highlights that the impact of academic workload allocations is often a silent barrier to the uptake of TEL strategies in higher education. With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that the drive for embracing open learning materials is not pushed from a bottom-up level. As Suber states:
My honest belief from experience in the trenches is that the largest obstacle to OA is misunderstanding. The largest cause of misunderstanding is lack of familiarity, and the largest cause of unfamiliarity is preoccupation. Everyone is busy.
Ease of Sharing Materials
Although time is a key barrier for academics in embracing open learning materials, Suber has found evidence that the reason why academics are not embracing open wholeheartedly is not based on a reluctance to share. Rather, it is the lack of ease of sharing open materials, such as IP and copyright issues, that are contributing factors in the reluctance of academics to engage with open. These issues, whilst being important to academics, are not insurmountable and the evidence that the reluctance to share is not an opposition to open is encouraging. It is also something that can be addressed through information sharing and awareness raising within an institution. Additionally, practical initiatives such as Creative Commons, are readily available for academics to tap into and for institutions to promote.
Cost
It’s also important to remember that open doesn’t mean free. There is a significant financial cost to committing to being open. For example, the total annual cost of MIT OpenCourseWare is about $3.5 million. Not an insubstantial sum at all. However, is this comparable to the amount of money that higher education institutions spend on keeping learning materials under lock and key in their VLEs? Is it comparable to the amount of money it takes to create and run a host of MOOCs within an institution?
Focus on Research
Could it be that one of the reasons why institutions have not made a leap into embracing open learning materials is that there is too much focus on research and making that research open? For example, The University of Manchester's top goal in their 2020 strategic vision is ‘World-class research’. To quote directly from the strategy:
The three central objectives of our research strategy are to achieve research of the highest quality, to support and develop excellent people, and to have an impact beyond academia which yields economic, social and cultural benefits.
Do those three central objectives not apply to ‘World-class teaching’ too? Could that be achieved through making learning materials open? Furthermore, it seems ironic that institutions want to push their research agenda and make it as widely and as freely available through OA publishing but hide away their teaching.
Impact on Student Attendance
Another potential barrier that academics and institutions alike may face is the negative impact that open learning materials may have on attendance of new students to the university or current students to individual taught classes. In this context, it does seem strange that MIT would go down this route considering the high cost access to higher education in the United States. MIT tuition and fees are equivalent to £38k in the UK. This paper has found that MIT OCW has not negatively affected student recruitment numbers.
On an institutional level, one of the big issues that academics will often site for not wanting to make learning materials openly available is that it will impact on student attendance in the physical classroom. For example, this is especially true for making lecture capture available to students. There has been a lot of research into the impact of lecture capture on student attendance . However, the literature has found time and time again that the availability of lecture capture does not negatively impact attendance. It is therefore unlikely that students would stop attending classes if their learning materials were openly available.
What would be the benefit of embracing open learning materials?
Here at The University of Manchester, what could we gain from embracing open learning materials? I have identified 3 potential benefits for academics, students, the institution and the wider community.
Enhance the Quality of Teaching
For academics, open learning materials could facilitate sharing materials and sharing ideas between colleagues and promote interdisciplinarity. Additionally, it could help save precious time through sharing resources. On a pedagogic level, academics could benefit from peer learning and adopt new ideas into their teaching methods. For example, less time spent on developing resources could mean trying a new teaching approach such as flipping the classroom.
For current students open learning materials could contribute to a more holisitic university experience where they can use and review materials from different subjects and make links with other students on other course. For potential students, open learning materials is an excellent way to showcase teaching at the university. Alumni could benefit from access to learning materials long after they graduate.
For the institution, open learning materials could have a potential positive impact on key initiatives such as the Teaching Excellence Framework that recognises and rewards excellent teaching and learning in UK higher education. Additionally, publishing open learning materials can have a very positive impact on traffic to an institution's website. The MIT OCW stats speak for themselves.
Social Responsibility
On a wider platform, open learning materials could have a very positive impact on the wider community and contribute to true social responsibility, which is one of the three goals in the university’s strategic vision. Open learning materials can empower people all over the world to have a positive impact on their own lives and the lives of their communities. We already open our research, we encourage the community to attend the campus, why not make learning materials open too? Suber has used the term nonrivalrous (a term from the economics of property) to describe access to open knowledge. He says:
We can share it without dividing it and consume it without diminishing it. My possession and use of some knowledge doesn’t exclude your possession and use of the same knowledge.
It seems open makes sense politically, culturally and economically.
An Alternative to MOOCs?
As I mentioned earlier in this blog, there has been a shift towards making learning materials more accessible to the world via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). However, could we benefit from opting for OCW over MOOCs?
When comparing a MOOC and OCW, there is a distinct gulf in the definition of open. The open in MOOC tends to equate to free, as in free access for students. However, free is not the most important factor in the definition of open. Rather it is the freedom to re-use and remix online teaching and learning materials. The European Parliamentary Research Service Blog states that the two most important aspects of openness are:
free availability and as few restrictions as possible on the use of the resource, whether technical, legal or price barriers. Contrary to MOOCs, OCWs do not offer an entire course, only materials. OCWs are under Creative Commons licenses, which allows the use, reuse and distribution of materials, whereas the most successful MOOCs are under copyright licences.
Considering the amount of time, money and effort that goes into producing MOOCs would it be worth institutions opting for open learning materials like OCW over MOOCs? David Wiley argues that the difference between OCW and MOOCs at the end of the day may be nothing more than managing expectations. He argues that OCW material and MOOC materials have a lot in common to the students who are taking the courses — they both have open learning materials, freely available to use. However, MOOCs have positioned themselves as student-facing that often ends up with courses replicating a traditional teaching model except without the teaching support that you would get in a traditional classroom. This often leads to MOOC students feeling disappointed and demotivated and ultimately not finishing the MOOC (I hold my hands up here too). However, dipping in and out of the learning materials on an OCW platform could satisfy the same curiosity without having to build a course for that material.
New horizons
The latest 2018 NMC Horizon Report indicates that a mid-term key trend in accelerating HE technology adoption is the proliferation of OERs, which seems to be bringing open learning materials back to the forefront of HE discourse. Open learning materials can play a key role in enhancing the quality of teaching within an institution as well as unlocking knowledge in the wider global community.
As this movement grows in the next 3–5 years could The University of Manchester be at the forefront of this shift towards open? I see a gap for a new role within the university to promote open learning material and share and disseminate open learning resources. They would help enable academic staff to become more open practitioners through information sharing and awareness of copyright and IP issues. They would promote open learning materials and run community engagement events through social media. They would work with subject librarians and the e-learning teams to reuse and remix open learning materials. They would work with students to make open learning materials available in their studies. They would work to promote open learning materials at an institutional level to support key strategies and policies.
In today’s world I believe that we all have a duty to make information as open and transparent as possible. The more we operate in what we perceive as an open platform (e.g. Facebook, Google) the more privacy and autonomy we give away as we are shoehorned into an online ecosystem that turns us from citizens into consumers. Just spend 5 minutes on this website to have a look at what information Facebook and Google hold about you. Learning materials should be open without the need for sign-ups and logins.
As well as a duty, open is also a political issue. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to education’. In this context, open learning materials can play a pivotal role in enhancing the quality of education as well as contributing to the social advancement of the wider community.
