Global politics and Open Educational Resources in higher education

The idea of Open Education Resources (OERs) is that pedagogical material is made available online, free for anyone to use, under an open license. The kinds of materials we might make available are the curricula in our course guides, accompanying lecture slides, audio or video recordings of lectures, assessment tasks and marking criteria. This open knowledge strategy offers educational resources to people around the world who are otherwise without access to the best work on teaching in higher education. OERs offer great potential to distribute educational capital and generate interest in higher education to less developed parts of the world, especially to academic colleagues teaching in universities elsewhere and even to individuals who wish to learn about a topic on their own initiative. It may even lead to productive knowledge collaborations between staff and students in different countries.

However, the OER idea is not without controversy. MOOCs, the best known form of OER, are hugely popular but have been criticised on many grounds, not the least of which is by academics who see them taking away employment from those of us holding university posts. But beyond concerns prompted by immediate self-interest, we need to have a wider debate about the global diffusion of online free OERs and what this means for global society.

To think through the pros and cons of advancing Open Knowledge in universities, we must consider the political dimensions of knowledge production in the world today. While ideas and scientific discoveries are not in themselves political, the social uses to which knowledge is put have an unavoidably political aspect. If knowledge is power, then universities, too, are most definitely significant sources of social power.

What we do with that knowledge is never going to be entirely neutral. Ever since the Manhattan Project, each individual researcher has had to confront ethical and political questions about what research questions to pursue and how the findings might be used. At the institutional level, states have always had a close association with universities, which have provided knowledge for governments to manage societies, discoveries that benefit commercial enterprises, and graduates to work in both. While we understand that universities’ autonomy requires remaining at a distance from both the public and private sectors, we know that we are nonetheless part of a global elite. Our activities influence the distribution of power in world society. Therefore we have a special responsibility in how we use that power.

By insisting on the openness of knowledge, along with the independence of rigorous critical inquiry, universities can continue to be a force for democracy around the world. The open society idea put forward by German philosopher Karl Popper is a grand intellectual defence of liberal democratic values that asserts the centrality of transparency in public life and of questioning in scientific inquiry. This work underpins the principle of open knowledge, asserting its importance in opposing the totalitarian control of knowledge and in promoting democracy. Popper’s work inspired such contemporary organisations as the Open Society Foundations founded by George Soros and the Open Knowledge Foundation, which promotes the open use of data. It defines openness: ‘Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose’.

Universities are key drivers of the Open Knowledge movement and will be crucial players in the future. The internet represents a great opportunity to improve educational standards across the world and to share intellectual advances with developing countries and their peoples when knowledge might otherwise be limited to elites in the advanced countries.

To me, the question surely isn’t whether we should get behind open access educational resources, or not. Rather, it is whether we can live with ourselves if we don’t. Global norms are changing rapidly and many institutions have already moved to produce Open Education Resources (OERs). Ewan Chamings considers the case for the University of Manchester to get ahead of the game and become a forerunner of the OER movement, given that some UK institutions have already done so.

Universities are key producers of knowledge across the world and are respected by the general public for our principled position on research and for our independence from government and private sector interests. Because academic practice has valued knowledge for its own sake much of what we do is not bound up by commercial-in-confidence provisions, leaving us at liberty to put values at the centre of our practice.

In his much lauded volume on higher education, What are Universities For?, Stefan Collini argues that universities should not be defined by the ‘use’ value of a higher education. Instead, universities are “a corporation for the cultivation and care of the community’s highest aspirations and ideals” (p. 86). Collini’s vision is one in which universities are very much a public good, which is valued by the public for more than any instrumental value that might be obtained from scientific discoveries or graduates imbued with intellectual capital. We are educators and producers of research knowledge who put knowledge itself, discovery for its own sake, at the centre of our efforts. And we are prepared to teach on any topic for those students who want to learn simply to tickle their intellectual curiosity. By cultivating a view of knowledge without restriction, and which belongs to all human beings, then we are fulfilling our community mission and living up to the highest ideals.

It is sometimes argued that universities must be behave like businesses and therefore should jealously protect all their sources of revenue. This is supposedly a fact that results from the stark reality of the commercialised market in higher education and research. This is said to particularly apply to the most basic business of universities, teaching students, which brings in the vast bulk of operating revenue. However, this picture concedes far too much. Yes, universities are commercial enterprises and compete for student registrations. But they are also not at the same risk of failure as other commercial enterprises. Also, they are underpinned by state finances, by students’ willingness to pay for education, and by the value that education has for employers, who don’t have to pay for it themselves. We can certainly afford to think bigger than the bottom line.

Is it true that OERs are a threat to our commercial survival? Were we to give away our course guides, our lecture slides and tutorial plans, and even our programme regulations, would students stop enrolling? I doubt it, because students still need and want to be guided through course material by actively engaged lecturers. And they mostly want to share a physical classroom with other students, because they know that learning is as much about engagement in dialogue with peers as it is about obtaining knowledge from a book or an internet page.

In any event, commercially, I don’t think universities have much to fear from open knowledge. While many other industries have seen their survival seriously threatened by new technology companies — popular music companies, taxi firms, newspapers — higher education has continued to expand. MOOCs have reached a huge audience without wrecking the financial basis of higher education. Universities themselves have integrated MOOCs into their own educational provision and are the most trusted providers to deliver quality courses. The reputation of universities, backed by many accumulated years of good academic practice, means that they can provide a quality assurance that commercial organisations cannot. Universities can also use their own substantial revenues — and, in most cases, their public status and backing by taxpayers — to operate MOOCs without the requirement of returning a large profit. It seems that universities have successfully colonised MOOCs, rather than the other way around. Indeed, MOOCs have not produced any significant innovation in learning. University provision is not under threat.

So, rather than feeling commercially threatened by the advent of open knowledge, universities are rather in a position of having to consider investing in openness on the basis of values. Do we choose to protect our intellectual output or share it? The open access transformation of research is already well underway, driven by governments here and abroad.

But the most important, and contentious, agenda is the drive to supply OERs. Making our teaching resources available online, in navigable repositories, could be of enormous use to intellectuals in other countries. Freely available information may make possible substantial improvements in university education in the developing world. This distribution of information would also, importantly, not be prescriptive, but a simple resource for educators in other countries to utilise and adapt for their own ends. This means greater potential for others to debate and critique and suggest improvements to it, realising the potential of a non-Western perspective that we lack.

But the OER project should not be thought of solely as a matter of commercialism versus idealism. OER resources are disseminated via the internet, but the internet is not a politics-free space. Access to, control of, and profit from, the internet is highly contested. So, the way universities use it matters because it contributes to international values regarding the use of information.

In the early days of the internet, cyber-utopians such as John Perry Barlow believed that the advent of worldwide communication would necessarily be a liberating force. He argued that cyberspace would be entirely independent from governments. Since then, various innovations, such as social media, have similarly been argued to be unique and emancipatory, enabling human beings to communicate beyond existing power structures and change society as a result.

Some of the debates can be found in the Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation for the BBC (39:41–50:33). Curtis argues that the 1960s counterculture in the US was fundamentally anti-politics, with key figures from this era going on to be key players in the development of the worldwide web. This utopianism faltered when commercial organisations were able to dominate the collection and use of digital data.

Profit-making through the internet took off with the development of data extraction to support targeted advertising. Shoshana Zuboff argues that the new economy is a form of ‘surveillance capitalism’, in which technology companies expand their data collection and monitoring mechanisms into all areas of social life for the purpose of extracting more and more information about individuals. This data is then sold on to other companies. Data has become a new commodity in the 21st century.

The inventor of the internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, believes that last 15 years of the internet has seen a downturn in openness, with corporations and governments now seeking to regulate and control information for their own power. Opinion on the Cambridge Analytica scandal suggests that digital data was used to unduly influence democratic elections, with major consequences. With these innovations in data collection and analysis, we see a huge power shift in the digital world away from the utopian vision of empowered individuals.

Because of this, what universities do with their knowledge really matters. When universities stand up for an internet of shared resources, then it runs against the kind of exploitation performed by Cambridge Analytica and other digital technology companies. We cannot stop the kind of data monitoring and extraction described by Zuboff — regulation must be performed by governments — but we can work to a superior set of values in giving away our resources for others to use, for free.

Beyond upholding the highest aspirations of our community in sharing knowledge, there is a substantial ‘soft power’ benefit to be realised if the University of Manchester leads on OERs. Our reputation would be enhanced in other parts of the world as a leader in teaching and learning. We would make good on our strategic priorities for social responsibility. And we would demonstrate to our students that we practice what we preach in aiming to transform the world for the better.

Global social change is far more likely to be effected through teaching and learning, rather than research alone. Even when made open access, scholarly research papers are usually highly specialised and only read by — and often only readable by — a small population of experts. The only question for an audience is usually whether to believe the findings or reject them, without any productive engagement about ideas.

But teaching and learning is a dynamic, interactive process that draws the audience into the process. The open knowledge idea is quite compatible with democratic, emancipatory ideas on education, such as put forward by John Dewey and Paolo Freire. These thinkers made the argument that when education is interactive and problem-based, learners are empowered to ask questions of expert knowledge, to refuse to accept it face value, and then also to potentially transform society.

Perhaps this, too, is a somewhat utopian idea. However, I do think that the kind of active learning long valued and promoted at Manchester is something we should value and offer to others. Global change will not be effected by the simple adoption of Western research findings. But it might be generated by engagement between scholars and students in a joint effort.

Take climate change, for instance, the most pressing problem in the world today. But it is also a classic collective action problem: how do we convince individuals to make a change in their behaviour when this may bring immediate costs that could easily be deferred to others who do make the effort? The climate problem needs to engage individuals, everywhere, in addressing the problem. This is best done by an engagement strategy through education and the excitement of learning.

One idea might be that the University of Manchester produce a single repository of educational material on climate change, encompassing disciplines such as geography, geology, politics, biology, business studies and beyond. A package of course materials would enable scholars, civil servants and corporate professionals in other countries to teach students, in their own context, about the climate problem to transform action and work towards the multiple, micro-level actions needed.

But this can’t be done on a case-by-case basis. The OER challenge needs institutional support from the whole university and, hopefully, from the collective community of UK higher education.

References

Cadwalladr, C. (2019) ‘Cambridge Analytica a year on: “a lesson in institutional failure”’, The Observer 17 March 2019. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-year-on-lesson-in-institutional-failure-christopher-wylie (accessed 25 August 2019).

Chamings, E. (2018) ‘Time to promote an OER policy at UoM?’ Medium, 30 May 2018. Available: https://medium.com/open-knowledge-in-he/time-to-promote-an-oer-policy-at-uom-e90409fb91bd (accessed 28 August 2019).

Class Central (2018) ‘By the Numbers: MOOCs in 2018: MOOC report’, December 11 2018. Available: https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-stats-2018/ (accessed 20 August 2019).

Collini, S. (2012) What are Universities For? London: Penguin.

Curtis, A. (2016) ‘HyperNormalisation’, BBC Television 16 October. Available BBC iPlayer https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=hypernormalisation and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU (accessed 28 August 2019).

Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company.

Freire, P. (2014 [1968]) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.

Moe, R. (2018) ‘The MOOC is not dead, but maybe it should be’, WONKHE, 3 April 2018. Available: https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-mooc-is-not-dead-but-maybe-it-should-be/ (accessed 17 August 2019).

Popper, K. (2012 [1945]) The Open Society and its Enemies. London: Routledge.

Zuboff, S. (2019) Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York, NY: PublicAffairs.