Discussing Openness in Education
with Professor Richard Reece
Transcript
My name’s Richard Reece; I’m the Associate Vice President for Teaching, Learning and Students at the University of Manchester.
What are the characteristics that define openness?
I think, really, having — in my own sphere, which is looking at educational resources — having openness is an enormous advantage, because it means that people don’t need to reinvent the wheel. And there are a lot of cases where staff will need to be involved with the production of materials that they’re going to deliver. And in some cases that works really well, and in some cases there are things that are better that are out there, and having the availability of those materials out there can enormously help the teaching experience.
I think there are advantages for teachers: that they don’t need to remake things that are already there and perhaps are there better; but there’s also an advantage to learners as well in accessing open materials. In some ways, it shifts the onus of the educational experience away from a teacher — student relationship, and gives more empowerment to students themselves to take more control over their learning experiences. So, openness, I think, is a very good thing in terms of education.
How does open practice manifest itself in the way that we deliver teaching at The University of Manchester?
Probably the most obvious example is the Massive Open Online Courses that we run, and the open resources that are packaged together, if you like, as part of the courses that we run. But there are many other examples as well where materials have been produced in one setting and are perhaps either reused in that setting or repurposed for other activities as well. There are a large number of examples of where the materials that have been produced by Manchester are used extensively elsewhere in the institution but also in other places as well.
What are the benefits of openness in a higher education teaching and learning environment?
We’ve talked a little bit about the benefits for both staff and students. Perhaps the more intangible benefits though are to get Manchester known as a place where excellent resources can be produced; excellent educational resources can be produced. So, one of the things that maps onto the strategic agenda for the Manchester 2020 vision is for by 2020 for The University of Manchester to produce an excellent teaching and learning experience. Part of that is getting known for having an excellent teaching and learning experience, not just producing one, and having excellent materials that can be used around the world for the education of students — both here and elsewhere — is to really get Manchester on the map to be known for the production of excellent, high-quality teaching materials.
What issues arise through open practice?
Most of the things we’ve talked about are benefits — benefits to learners, benefits to staff who are teaching on these courses. There are some down-sides as well: probably the biggest one is cost. The cost of the production of these materials is on the producer, and so as long as everyone acts in an altruistic fashion and makes a lot of things open, then perhaps you can get some of that cost back for the production of the materials. Clearly, if it’s just one institution or a few institutions that are producing these materials, then the costs can be significant for these institutions for the production of these very high-quality materials. So, a lot of it needs to really get into the notion of why you want to do ‘openness’ itself, and it really does get the whole of the community involved; it’s not just a few institutions that can produce these high-quality resources. But many institutions can both produce and use these types of resources, as they go on from there.
So that’s one of the downsides. The other downside, I think, is a notion of quality. At The University of Manchester we want to produce quality resources and that’s what we try and make sure that all of our resources are. Anyone who has looked on Google for any topic that they’re interested in teaching — perhaps for the first time — will know that not all of the resources there are high-quality. So it’s really trying to make sure that what we — as an institution — produce are of the highest possible quality, but then surveying the other things that are out there to have some knowledge of what is good and what is perhaps not so good. And of course, what’s good in one context may not necessarily be good in another context. So there are changes that are there; again, it’s down to individual instructors or individual students to figure out what’s right for them.
What problems do you see openness solving?
Openness can stop people reinventing the wheel — that’s certainly one thing — and it can certainly get The University of Manchester’s name for education out there much more widely; perhaps more widely into areas that we are not perhaps well-known in at the moment. So again going back to the Manchester 2020 vision, we want to make sure that we have educational activities that are available for all, be they from disadvantaged backgrounds or under-represented groups of the population. So again we can start to use these — we are starting to use these — as mechanisms to show what The University of Manchester does, and to show the sorts of activities that students who come here are going to be exposed to, but also using them for other resources as well.
What open resources do you particularly like and why?
Well, I think here, you always have to go back to your home discipline. So I use open resources in my own teaching, and a number of the things that I teach on — I’m a Biologist by training and I deal with DNA molecules, mainly — some of the open resources that really try to explain how DNA, as a molecule, works: how it’s taken apart, how it’s replicated, how gene expression occurs. All of those sorts of areas have a very rich history of open resources being associated with them. As a teacher, being able to take bits and pieces from various aspects of resources that have already been produced — all very high quality — means that I can tailor something for my own students; my own needs, if you like. So I can concentrate on a particular aspect that I think I can add value to — and not necessarily have to worry about the production of high-quality models or other types of AV (audio-visual) materials or other things that have already been produced.
How can openness help us achieve the Manchester 2020 strategic goals?
It comes back to what those goals are and how we are tangibly going to achieve them. We are determined to create a rich and vibrant atmosphere for our students, be they on-campus or off-campus. Traditionally, open resources have often been thought of as electronic resources and therefore they map onto distance learning or students who are interacting through Blackboard with materials. But of course, they don’t always have to be that, and many of the open resources that we have are paper-based resources that you can then use in classrooms.
All of that together really creates this very vibrant and interesting educational environment. Clearly you need good teachers there, don’t get me wrong. But using educational resources that are open in this context, although it puts some of the emphasis on the learning experience, good teachers are required in order to direct students through these appropriate resources. And again, giving the students a particular notion or a particular slant on the topic, that perhaps they wouldn’t have got just from looking at the resources themselves. So for me, openness is a vital part of being able to show that The University of Manchester is doing the right things, to attract students to come to the institution because they can know what they can expect in terms of their teaching quality and the way that materials are presented to them. But then also, once students are here, we can continue to excite and stimulate them academically so that they can become the best that they can and reach their full potential.
