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James Glapa-Grossklag, College of the Canyons
Design with the learner in mind and focus on the learner’s goals. Get students involved in outreach, workflow, creation. Just as student governments today hold events to raise awareness of mental health or voter registration, so too should Open be a part of their messaging. Further, students from non-elite institutions should join our conversations. (I can bring the student OER advocates I work with in California.)
Mainstream Open education into other reform movements in education. Sure, we talk about bringing together open data and open science and open access publishing. But that’s not where the action is in public higher education. The action is in reducing equity gaps and developing guided pathways in order to increase completion with credentials. At every conversation about diversity and equity and inclusion, in every HR office, and every training on diversity and equity and inclusion, Open should be an example of how we can enact this.
Additionally, the guided pathways reform movement in community colleges, which create more focused student experiences to increase completion with credentials. An essential part of this should be zero textbook cost or z-degrees, built around OER, so that students never need to touch commercial products.
An overarching goal is to make Open disappear - fulfill the promise of education for everyone everywhere, just like secondary education in the US. We don’t debate whether or not students should pay for athletic equipment, wifi, libraries, etc. These are seen as fundamental elements of education, and so too should access to openly licensed artifacts of knowledge and OERs.
. Some themes for discussion ... which may suggest possible new directions for what open might look like in the future. From publication to participation - The open world is still very tied to traditional models of publishing. At the same time we are losing out to new platforms that feature user-generated content. How can we get more people (students, non-formal learners, anyone) involved in making open learning a two-way street. Open has to be more than access to stay relevant.
From text to mobile + video - Today's users are mobile 1st (and often mobile only) and video is the dominant medium not just to access content, but to communicate with others. Yet most of the open education world is still fully browser based. And video often means a recording a lecture from the back of the room. We're falling behind on content design as well as technology.
From the old to the new reality - YouTube is the largest education platform in the world, even though by most of the classic definitions it is not "open". What does that mean for open? Copyright reform has been slow and largely unsuccessful. Do we need a new approach to frameworks like licenses and legal rights? Or is holding on to them even more crucial at this point?
From access to equity - I think this one is self-explanatory.
Ross Mounce, Arcadia Fund
One of my top priorities for the future of open is to reform copyright to enable equality of access and usage rights across jurisdictions. People should not need to be lawyers to understand what they can and cannot do. They should be able to always rely on the exception that grants them minimum rights to use content to do research, teaching, or learning. Those minimum rights should never be replaced by licenses or overridden by contracts.
Curt Newton, MIT OpenCourseWare
The world's hunger for knowledge is boundless, so I want that knowledge from a wide range of sources and voices to be easily discoverable and freely available, wherever people are, on the channels they use and in the forms they need: from a bite-sized short introduction for self-paced learning, to latest research articulated for a broader audience (a la The Conversation), to a complete multi-week or multi-step course, to guided sequences with optional credential.
Huntington D. Lambert, Harvard University
I have a dream
I have a dream that one day every human talent
Regardless of the zip code of their birth
Has the opportunity to learn
To learn across their 105 year life
To learn across the 6-8 phases of that long life
To learn how to learn, then
To learn to apply their learning, then
To learn how to give their learnings to others
To have all their learning credentials accumulate under their control
To have the cost of learning vary only by the level of human support they need
To have all the materials that supported their learning forever available in the cloud at no cost
I have a dream that the shared pursuit of learning globally will allow every person to contribute to a more peaceful future regardless of the zip code of their birth
Peter B. Kaufman, MIT Open Learning and MIT Knowledge Futures Group
My vision is that we all should explore – now – whether knowledge institutions have some kind of responsibility to pour the knowledge they own, control, and support into the Commons – and, working together, establish a stronger force, a Rebel Alliance, to stop the wholesale erosion of truth worldwide.
Angela DeBarger, Hewlett Foundation
My priorities for open learning:
Make equity explicit and central. It is not just about who has access to knowledge, but also who is able to create and share knowledge. Including diverse voices and perspectives in the creation of knowledge gets us closer to truth or possible truths.
Focus on the needs of learners and educators, who are the intended “beneficiaries” of open learning.
Examine interdisciplinary connections among fields of open. Addressing the intersections among open access, open education, open data, open science will be necessary to meet the needs of learners and educators.
Embrace the dynamic and context-dependent nature of open learning.