Chris Bourg, MIT Libraries
My top priority for the future of open is all about opening up research.
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.
MJ Bishop, University of Maryland
Willem van Valkenburg, TU Delft
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.
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.
Diana Wu, UC Berkeley Extension, New Academic Ventures at Berkeley, NAV-B
To support the enduring ideal and principles of open education by creating and developing sustainable models and practices.