Yes. open really matters. Maybe not every day to the most privilege, well represented learners, but the impact is profound for many of my students. Having been in higher education these past 20+ years, I have seen the loss of collegiality and rise of commodity when it comes to learning resources. This is not only being driven by corporate publishers, but also through cultural changes at colleges and universities that has shifted from free and open knowledge for all, to proprietary control of intellectual property.
Granted, everything has become punctuated acutely with COVID-19, but at my institutions over the past few decades, control of information as property and commodity has increased, and access to creative work, research and art has become more restricted, expensive and socially stratified. The future of learning in the digital age is a fluid and rapidly changing environment, where the economic and social models of the past can no longer sustain the current higher education model, and the old Western paradigm no longer adequately aligns with the majority of the worldās population of learners.
We canāt rely on charities anymore to get food and money to people in need. Nor can we rely on governments to create jobs. This goes even further when education is the topic. Open Education will prove itself as the only sustainable way of giving the disadvantaged a better chance in life. The days of paywalls are numberedā¦
For me, open access is extremely important, because we live in a digital age where anything is possible. To enhance an online learning community it is important to have access to open resources that are relevant and contribute to the body of knowledge that the students should study, analyses and synthesis.
One of the main problems today is the increasing price of textbooks which is getting higher and higher each day. Students should be able to buy eBooks at an affordable price or have access to open textbooks. But at this stage, there are not a lot of open textbooks available for students and there are also predatory journals out there, researchers (academics and students) should be very careful where they obtain their resources from.
With COVID19, our future has changed drastically, we will not be able to go back to where we were and how we were doing things, we need to look ahead and create opportunities for students to learn using open-access online resources available anywhere at any time.
It is worrying that so many publicly funded education institutions perpetuate artificial scarcity by locking down learning materials behind all rights reserved copyright when we have the opportunity to share to make a better world and use scarce funding more sustainably.
I agree - Given the COVID19 pandemic, hopefully education institutions will rethink and change practices for more sustainable futures in higher education.
Working in an academic library subscription department 20 years ago, it was all about the print journals coming in and getting ticked off and stamped, easy to scan / photocopy and share if needed. Then moved to document delivery a few years ago, and found so much behind pay walls, narrowing down what researchers could access even within a University environment. Hopefully open learning can reverse that trend somewhat in the near future. Good to see what is happening in the space currently.
This is a good example of how a Copyright regime designed for print media is unfairly restricting access for research purposes in a digital age. Research is considered by many copyright acts (although not universally) as a reasonable exception.
That said, the growth of quality open access journals has improved - but still many prestige journals are behind paywalls :-(.
As an educator and an artist, the ideas of copyright and freedom of information are things I constantly think about, but havenāt figured out exactly where I stand. I do believe that basic knowledge should be free and easily available, but also that a personās creative output should be somehow protected. I can also see why a teacher would want to write a textbook to compensate their income versus just give their knowledge away, but I donāt understand how a textbook can be so expensive. And, the idea that people have to pay to read the journal articles that professors are required to write for their job is crazy to me, but I always assumed that was in order to pay for the publication and the peer reviewers. All of this is pretty new to me and a bit overwhelming, so Iām looking forward to learning more in this course.
Important questions and many tensions. I can see why, in many cases, an artist would want to protect the integrity of creative expression. Also, speaking personally, I believe in the protection of human rights, for example the right to earn a living wage.
From a sustainability perspective, I see nothing wrong in earning a living from activities which add meaningful value to open licensed content. However, I do not approve of exploitative corporate practices where open content is locked behind a paywall without adding any substantive value.
So lots for us to think about and I hope we can unpack an share views on the many tensions we have in the open (and closed) world.
Graduating from an Open University, my concept of learning became more even wider. I view learning as more of being openāsharing your thoughts, collaborating, interacting with fellow learners and teachers, and even to the world (digital or actual). Thus, open really matters to me. I believe in providing wider access to quality education for all.
Since access is crucial to innovation and development, it is important that one can access information, knowledge, and such without any hindrances such as costs and technological barriers. With open resources, innovation and development is limitless.
When the door is lock, itās not open. That basically what I view of those materials that entails membership fees and account for you to be able to access the resource.
In my opinion, there are two categories of open concept in todayās education arena.
First is fully-open concept. This kind of concept can be found in some online learning sites such as in #LiDA101, my university has a MOOCs site http://moocs.ut.ac.id/, etc. They fully and freely open the access to its content, learning activities, and even they freely offer/provide a certificate of completion. Some open access journal can also be found where the reader can fully access and download the article from their sites. Some OERs can also be found in Flickr, some videos on Youtube, Slideshare, etc. of course with a credit of acknowledgement to the creator (CC).
Second is semi-open concept. Some courses in edX and Coursera are opened freely for accessing the content and learning activities but to get a certificate of completion a participant must pay an amount of money.
In one hand, I do really hope that it could be more and more fully-open learning resources in the future. On the other hand, there is a challenge to educate users of those open learning resources to give a credit of acknowledgement to the creators.
Its great to see these MOOCs on your site - but learners need to create an account before being granted access to the learning materials. So they are closed for individuals who do not wish to create accounts on the site. What license is used for the materials?
So I would say that your UT MOOCs are also semi-open like edX and Coursera.
I donāt mean to be overly critical - but just asking the question: To qualify as an OER course, should access to the materials be restricted requiring registration on the site before learners can see the materials?
Yes, as an open collaboration it is possible for anyone to add value to our OER course materials. We use wiki technology which provides detailed version control of all edits which can be checked before new versions of the course materials are published on the course web sites.
We believe that working together we can achieve more than working alone.
I completely agree with you. I see Wayneās agreement response, and I too hope that there may be changes that will positively impact higher education. But I also worry that with the recession brought on by the pandemic, fewer people will be able to afford college. I just read a disturbing article yesterday in the New York Times, The Public in Public College Could Be Endangered, which predicts that these engines of change for many in the US will become even less affordable, and a number of them might not even survive. This just strengthens the need for open resources available to all.
The economic sustainability of higher education in many parts of the industrialised world was fundamentally broken before the pandemic. The COVID-19 crises has amplified deep underlying challenges. For the last decade, the cost of higher education has been increasing way in excess of the inflation index - such models cannot be sustained indefinitely. We need to find more sustainable models and OER is part of the solution imo.
Iāve been teaching w/ OER materials for years, but I havenāt been nearly as dligilent about making sure my own work - academic or creative - is published in open sources. Iām starting to realize (Iām late to the party) that as long as academics keep willingly handing over our work, for free, to for-profit publishers to be placed behind a paywall, weāll have a tough time making knowledge āopenā - and in the process, weāll lose out on a lot of good ideas.