How Open could Higher Education be?
In my post earlier this year, I commented on the difficulties I have personally faced previously in attempting to get resources and teaching materials out into the Open so they could be freely available for anyone to use. In this post I want to examine the, perhaps, utopian dream of having open Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
“Openness, the opposite of secrecy, refers to a kind of transparency which is usually seen in terms of access to information, especially within organisations, institutions, or societies”
United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
Dreaming of a truly open Higher Education (HE) experience I don’t think is a big ask: there are of course complications and would require changes in approach, but surely it’s not something that should be dismissed out of hand.
As a society we are moving towards a more open perspective. Transparency within Government now is commonplace, as Peters and Britez (2008) describe, with public records open to public scrutiny, and individuals have rights of access to such information. Considering our lives on the web, tools such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Unsplash are prime examples where individuals across society can input information and take out information as and when required promoting equitable knowledge transfer and assist in building a more open society. When you consider the web development industry, resources such as GitHub which allow all developers to view and develop others peoples code bases as well as use the code for their personal applications. In my opinion, it is the hallmark to which open education should be aspiring to.
“Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal.”
The bread and butter of HEIs are Research and Teaching & Learning, typically ratified as strategic goals for the institution. HEIs want to be good at both of these so the question becomes one of how can these strategic goals be accomplished in an open educational format.
To accommodate the vision of making all scientific research free, the report made a number of recommendations, firstly a change in the way the research is published from “a reader-pays to an author-pays system”. As reported in The Guardian at the time, this transition was estimated to cost £60m per annum but that undertaking it would bring benefits for UK economy and increase efficiency of research.
Two publication options now exist. The Gold route allows for immediate access to everyone for free but publishers charge the authors article processing charges (APCs), through advertising, donations or other subsidies. The Green route however means depositing the final peer-reviewed research into an electronic repository and access is granted either immediately or after an agreed date (HEFCE).
In his 2016 interview, Professor Luke Georghiou, Vice President for Research and Innovation at The University of Manchester, highlights how that “knowledge which has been publicly funded should be freely available to all users with minimum transaction costs” and that “it should be sufficiently documented so that the users can make full and complete use of it”.
Making research data openly available has a number of benefits. Georghiou highlights that the most beneficial being that it ensures that effective data verification can take place, that the research can be reproduced by another academic or institution and the same results can be found and, if required the research can be extended. He also notes that if the research is open, its available to be read by as many people as possible, it’s used more often by people across the world to inform decisions, and also that the research is cited more often which thus in turn means heightened reputation benefit both for the academic and the institution.
Indeed, the individual academic perspective supports these latter benefits. In an interview recorded in 2014, Professor Robert Stevens of The University of Manchester, states “I like Open Access as I like as many people as possible to be able to get hold of my research publications…they are read more and cited more”.
Georghiou notes though that one thing to consider is that making all research data open could cause issues as “the cost implications could be horrendous if every bit of data…had to be made available in the proper documented way that an open data approach would demand”.
Another consideration, as Paul Shore notes in his post Academic Prestige & Open Access Publishing, where a journal is published (i.e. which prestigious journal is publishing in) is still extremely important within the academic community: “we hold established journals in high regard and want our work to be published in them”. Additionally, being published within these journals increases the “impact factor” which is then used to measure the H index and thus an academics productivity.
However, despite the issue of how to resolve “academic prestige” it’s important to note as well that everyone is taking the open access policy extremely seriously. For the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, all journal articles and conference proceedings (i.e. anything which is to be considered by the REF) must be published via either the Green or Gold publishing routes (HEFCE). From an Open HE perspective, this is great news.
There is in my opinion one thing that remains to be taken into account when considering research being open to the general public. The language used in academic research means that for some, the content might as well be written in a different language. If we were to be truly open we need to find a way to make content more accessible. If each published article were accompanied by a one pager which includes an understandable brief, a summary of the methodology and what the paper says along with an easy to understand list of results, recommendations and conclusions, then I believe this would be extremely well received across society. This isn’t about watering down content as there still is always going to be the audience for the original results: it’s about making sure that as many people as possible can understand what is being said.
In the world of fake news and anti-experts, I personally believe this would one of the most socially responsible step HEIs could make to counter the surge.
However, this small addition is nothing compared to the formidable steps already being taken.
When considering openness and Teaching & Learning (T&L), the Open Education Consortium’s definition says it best:
“Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.”
Under this definition, anything that we are producing could be classed as an Open Resource from a paper based resource for printing, to a standable interactive resource, all the way up to an entire course unit. The principle is that these Open Educational Resources (OERs) are “resources that are publicly accessible meaning that they are openly available for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute” (Temple University, 2017) typically which are listed on a digital repository either by the creators institution or externally.
OERs are nothing new and have been trending with the Horizon Report since 2013 but in the Horizon Report 2018, they are considered a mid-term trend which will be “Driving Ed Tech adoption in higher education for the next three to five years”.
There are significant strides being made in HEIs at the moment in relation to OERs. As Ewan Charming highlights in his post Time to promote an OER Policy at UoM?, institutions such as Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh are trailblazing by enshrining the production and publication of OERs into their mission statements to “make a significant, sustainable and socially responsible contribution to Scotland, the UK and the world” (University of Edinburgh, 2016).
In his 2016 interview, Professor Richard Reece, Associate Vice President for Teaching and Learning at The University of Manchester, states that when considering educational resources “openness is an enormous advantage because it means people don’t need to reinvent the wheel” noting that sometimes when you consider the production of materials, there “are things that are better that are out there…and they can enormously help the the teaching experience”.
These benefits to staff are complemented by benefits to students allowing them to take more direct ownership of their learning. Reece also highlights the institutional intangible benefits includes “getting Manchester known as a place where excellent [educational] resources can be produced”, a benefit which can enhance reputation amongst other institutions as well as act, as Reece highlights, a marketing tool to future potential students.
Reece does however highlight some problems when considering openness in relation to open educational resources; most importantly cost of production of quality materials. Reece notes that if everyone were producing high quality materials in an “altruistic fashion making a lot of things open then perhaps you can get some of that cost back” but if it were “one or a few institutions producing these materials then the cost can be significant on those institutions”. Therefore, really what we would need is a seismic shift in the current Higher Education set up so that all institutions began to make a lot more of their content openly available as unfortunately, nowadays, Higher Education operates within a market economy.
Marketisation of HE is a considerable threat to Open Education. Universities are in constant competition with one another — students and the £9k per annum they bring with them are hard currency for HEIs. Marketisation means that HEIs are continuously thinking inwards rather than outwards; what can they offer their students which competitors cannot. Ultimately that means two things nowadays: student experience and Teaching and Learning.
In his post If You’re Good at Something, Never Do It for Free, Shumit Mandal eludes how to institutions need to offer premium T&L products and with premium products come premium expectations…and premium is not something you expect to hear in the same sentence as free. As he puts it ‘low or no price tags are often perceived as proportional to quality’.
As Brown (2015) discusses in his article “The Marketisation of Higher Education: Issues and Ironies”, there a few benefits to this process. Students won’t get as good a T&L experience on the whole as they won’t have all the information (because its not being shared), therefore they’re not getting value for money. Institutions are paying out more money on facilities and operational systems to ensure they are better than their competitors, which thus means money is being diverted away from the other things that HEIs do, like Research and Teaching & Learning.
“Our universities were built from the principles of scarcity and closure: restricted access to libraries; special knowledge that could only be passed on in the lecture theatre; closed communities of scholarship. Today we are drowning in digital information, available almost everywhere…Learning and teaching is about making sense of this bewildering open world, with all its opportunities and its increasing dangers.”
Despite the current issue of marketisation of HE, all is not lost. The OER movement is still growing ever stronger and more and more people are coming round that content can be put online for others to use and that you can use materials others have made available. Is it happening at a fast enough pace yet…probably not. But could it pick up pace…I certainly hope so.
If the academic community were to come together, from all their host institutions and say “right, let’s put all our content up here and everyone can use it and we can all make our T&L exceptional” I think there would be a lot of support for it. Staff could bounce ideas around, take bits they liked, leave the bits they disliked, construct the knowledge as the way they best saw fit and deliver it to their students. Doing this would allow institutions to then concentrate on spending their fees cash on offering facilities, systems, staff and student experience.
Sandra Torres in her OKHE1 examination makes the point that perhaps HEIs should be looking at turning the dormant HE online courses into OERs. This would of course cost time and money to undertake, however the benefits could be huge as they would provide more people to high quality educational materials: if we are not using it, why not put it out there in the open for the community, preferably with a CC-BY Creative Commons license.
In her post Open Knowledge and Sharing Clare Huish, a lecturer with The University of Manchester, does illuminate a few issues within the current setup. Many people — myself included here — will happily use as many of the free and open resources available to us including OERs, Ted Talks, YouTube videos…whatever we can get our hands on which is going to bring our material to life, attributing along the way, however at the moment as an academic community we are not good at putting our masterpieces back out there into the community for others to enjoy: we don’t seem to have the time, don’t know how or (and commonly in my experience) we have obstacles in the way.
Regardless of these issues there are enormous opportunities for Teaching & Learning. It would seem that the only thing that needs to change — and it is a biggy — is a culture shift from everything that’s being created behind kept behind institutional closed doors to one where everyone places everything online openly, allowing others to “remix, reuse, reshare” as they require. When the content itself comes from the research (past and present) and the research is already going to be openly available, shouldn’t we be ensuring that the educational resources are openly available as well?
I could say something about MOOCs here but to be honest, I am a little let down by them; not all but many. As I mentioned in my previous post, they are not as open as they once were.
Final Thoughts
On the face of it I don’t honestly believe that we are that far away from an open educational experience if institutions chose to embrace it. Arguably if it were to be embraced, the T&L side of HE definitely has the most to do and it would be a huge culture shift.
There are concerns. Some people might not want to put their T&L out into the open forum as it opens the teaching experience to peer review and critique. But isn’t that just how all conversations progress and lessons learnt? Active dialogue, enhancing and improving. When you consider this, the benefits for institutions holistically are enormous. And the benefit for those who can’t attend University and for society globally would be enormous.
Concerns could also be made regarding a potential loss of income to HEIs as students would be able to access all of the materials they require to understand a subject, thus why bother with a degree. I counter this argument as going to University to study is much more than just a qualification: it is an experience. And more than that, studying independently is no substitute to working with world leading educators and researchers who will be able to assist students constructing and deconstructing knowledge, making new connections to the world around them. There will always be a market for the degree with students wishing to pay a premium to study on one.
In the coming years I really do hope we embrace the open movement with both hands. I feel if we were to get to 10 or 12 institutions like Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh in the UK, we may begin to hit a critical mass and everyone would start to get involved.
