From Chris Bourg:
The MIT Libraries’ vision is for a world where enduring, abundant, equitable, and meaningful access to information serves to empower and inspire humanity.
So my top priority is to get research outputs out from behind paywalls and off of proprietary infrastructure.
I hope the connection to learning is obvious, but will state my sense of that anyway – I want teachers and learners to always have access to credible, relevant, current research; without economic, social, or geographical barriers.
Ryan Merkley, Creative Commons
Nearly 20 years on, open has passed beyond the threshold of experimentation and pilots and has proven its value in education, but despite massive investment and broad adoption of open tools across disciplines, open education has yet to enter the mainstream. Further, as other (mostly market players) iterate or even improve on some of open’s “core features” — ease of collaboration, seamless access, simple remix and republishing, permissive structures — the models of open education have become more complex, and our communities continue to argue with themselves. Is that project open enough? Did they use the right license? How will we work with others? How will we fund it and make it sustainable?
The most rigid views of “what is open” are increasingly exclusionary and promote horizontal hostility between those who seek to contribute and who in fact share values. For marginalized communities, for the global south, for indigenous communities, questions about openness are too often met with hostility. Failing to address issues of sustainability, traditional knowledge, and needs of learners and educators, are preventing us from reaching the mainstream and ideally making open the default everywhere.
We should begin by working backwards from what our intended beneficiaries need, to meet them where they are, and where they already go to seek knowledge and learning opportunities. We need a collaborative user-driven approach to openness -- one that focuses on the widespread adoption of open values and practices, and builds from the strengths and unique value of each organization in the ecosystem. For example, Wikipedia is the 5th most popular website in the world, and the only non-profit with open infrastructure in the top 50. We should build on that strength. Collective action is open’s unique feature, but we too rarely act collectively as a movement — as The Big Open.
Vision statement Willem
From content focus to quality improvement
The last couple of years we see there is more focus on the usage of OER. In the US mostly driven by cost savings for students. The one promise of Open hasn’t been delivered to its full potential and that is quality improvement. They idea that others can take your resource, enrich it and share it back hasn’t been adopted widely. The opentextbook movement has been a front-runner in this, with pressbook and openstax. We should push to make this much easier based on open standards.
From traditional publishing to community collaboration
We are educating learners to work in the 21st century: multi-disciplinary projects to develop new services and products. Why is most course content developed by an individual teacher? In the Netherlands the Ministry of Education has a grant for open education, mandatory is that you have a community of educators working together to develop and re-usage open content.
This is not widely spread in academy. Mostly because our recognisation models are still based on individual performance (only articles where you are the first publisher count towards your promotion).
The community should consist not only of professors, but also students should have a great role in this.
From open education to open science
Traditionally universities are closed bastions of smart people. Their output is research papers and graduates. Open Education is part of a broader movement of opening up the black box that universities are for the public: open access, open publishing, open data, open software, open education. The common nominator is openness in what we do and what we make. We should work together with all these groups and join forces to change universities.
This includes open licensing, training for openness, open recognizing.
My university is a front-runner in this in the Netherlands and in Europe. Last year 63% of peer-reviewed articles were published open access, all our MOOC content is openly licensed, we have a 4TU Centre for Research Data to promote open data and data stewards to support researchers making their data open.