'Opening up Education' against the Policy Backdrop of the 'Knowledge Economy' in Higher Education – a Critical Discourse Analysis (original) (raw)
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Openness in Education: Claims, Concepts, and Perspectives for Higher Education
Seminar.net, 2017
Characteristics of openness can be found in many respects throughout the history of education. From Comenius’ call for pedagogical reform to postmodern educational theory, requirements of access, social justice, creativity, knowledge sharing, innovation, and capacity building have been emphasized in various ways. The chapter provides an outline of different understandings and notions of openness in educational contexts as well a discussion of their relevance for openness towards academic knowledge cultures and different forms of knowledge. Finally, the contribution highlights organizational, methodological, and critical perspectives as three aspects which appear to be undervalued in current debates about openness in higher education.
Open Education and Education for Openness
This series maps the emergent field of educational futures. It will commission books on the futures of education in relation to the question of globalisation and knowledge economy. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of discourses of the knowledge and learning economies. It aspires to build a consistent approach to educational futures in terms of traditional methods, including scenario planning and foresight, as well as imaginative narratives, and it will examine examples of futures research in education, pedagogical experiments, new utopian thinking, and educational policy futures with a strong accent on actual policies and examples. (paperback) ISBN 978-90-8790-680-1 (hardback) Published by: Sense Publishers,
The Pedagogy of the Open Society: Knowledge and the Governance of Higher Education
2012
Social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding value as evidenced in the growth of open source, open access and open education and their convergences that characterize global knowledge communities that transcend borders of the nation-state. Openness seems also to suggest political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of inquiry and the dissemination of its results. Openness is a value and philosophy that also offers us a means for transforming our institutions and our practices. This book examines the interface between learning, pedagogy and economy in terms of the potential of open institutions to transform and revitalize education in the name of the public good.
Open education: Walking a critical path
Open(ing) Education: Theory and Practice (Eds. Dianne Conrad & Paul Prinsloo), 2020
Link to Open Access version: http://eprints.teachingandlearning.ie/id/eprint/4345 ..... This chapter explores justifications for and movements toward critical approaches to open education. While “open” is often framed as an unequivocal good, the deceptively simple term hides a “reef of complexity” (Hodgkinson-Williams & Gray, 2009, p. 114), much of which depends on the particular context within which openness is considered and practiced. Critical approaches to open education consider the nuances of context, focus on issues of participation and power, and encourage moving beyond the binaries of open and closed. As a starting point, I draw on Lane’s (2016) analysis that open education initiatives can be considered in two broad forms. The first seeks to transform or empower individuals and groups within existing structures, e.g. by removing specific prior qualifications requirements, eliminating distance and time constraints, eliminating or reducing costs, and/or improving access overall. A second form of open education seeks to transform the structures themselves, and the relationships between the main actors (e.g. learners, teachers, educational institutions), in order to achieve greater equity. Many critical educators have planted their flags in the latter territory, advocating the use of an explicit inequality lens to support social transformation and cognitive justice. This chapter presents an argument for critical and transformative approaches to open education. After a brief overview of open education, I explore several different critical analyses of open education and then widen the lens to consider critical analyses of the networks and platforms on which many open practices rely. The chapter concludes with examples of and recommendations for critical approaches to open education.
Higher Education, 2016
Learning challenges in higher education: an analysis of contradictions within open educational practice Open education, including the use of open educational resources (OER) and the adoption of open education practice (OEP), has the potential to challenge educators to change their practice in fundamental ways. This paper forms part of a larger study focusing on higher education educators' learning from and through their engagement with OER. The first part of the study was a quantitative survey investigating educators' learning behaviour when they learned to use OER in their practice. The second part of the study explored qualitatively how educators engaged with OER and how they conceptualised their learning. Data was gathered through interviews with 30 higher education educators. This paper reports the analysis of these interviews. The analysis draws on the theory of self-regulated learning and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to explore the challenges adult education practitioners encounter when changing their practice. The study tests the application of a framework that traces the discursive manifestations of contradictions, exploring how this framework can be used to examine different aspects of self-regulated learning as educators learn how to use OER. We have identified three distinct tensions in higher education educators' practice: tensions between the emerging needs of the individual (as he or she adopts new forms of practice) and organisational policies; between the transfer of responsibilities from educators to students as new practice is embedded and institutional accountability; and between cost-efficiency and learning objectives. The framework for the discursive manifestations of contradictions was a useful tool used to surface these apparent tensions.
Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, 2019
This chapter explores the use of open educational practices (OEP) in higher education, the tensions posed by all forms of openness within the academy, the importance of critical approaches to openness, and specific policy considerations to facilitate open education approaches in the curriculum. Open educational resources and OEP emerged as some key areas of development within open education. Through the use of OEP, open educators aim to acknowledge the ubiquity of knowledge across networks and to facilitate learning that fosters agency, empowerment, and global civic participation. Open educators’ use of OEP is complex, personal, contextual, and continually negotiated within sometimes supportive, sometimes unsupportive institutional policy contexts and cultures. Intellectual Property policies at higher education institutions typically state that all work arising from the course of employment remains the intellectual property of the institution. Copyright is one specific form of intel...
The Contribution of Openness to Transforming Education
European Journal of Education, 2015
Reflecting on what learning prepares for today means facing the paradoxical distance between the increasing level of ‘openness’ in business, entertainment and ‘out of school’ life and the resistance to opening up formal education systems. In a world where information and knowledge are co-created and flow rapidly and globally through social media, potentially tearing down most of the barriers that could prevent people from learning anything, anywhere, and at any time, schools and universities, as well as a number of other public institutions, seem to be resisting this dynamic, trying to maintain the role of ‘knowledge owners’ that they have been playing for centuries.To simplify, knowing where to look or who to ask for a specific piece of information is a highly-valued skill for adult life, whereas in formal education this is still considered cheating.
Open Politics and Education
The educational dimensions of Openness elicit very strong and impassioned responses. On the one hand are Open activists and advocates, who see the promises of open, especially those arising with digital and distributed networked technologies, as the panacea to a lot of contemporary challenges at building just, fair, and safe educational platforms. Openness, for them, encompasses a wide spectrum of processes, values, and ideologies, ranging from calls for dismantling the classroom to the augmentation of existing pedagogic practices that would change the inequalities of power and inequities of ownership that are identified as key critiques of the modernist-capitalist university framework. On the other hand are the Open skeptics, who point out that the unbridled celebration of openness is both utopian and unsustainable. Eschewing the idea of the Open as an alternative, they are quick to point out that open is equally constructed by positions of power and can often be exclusionary and discriminatory, toward those who do not offer themselves to be opened up. Openness, in these discourses, emerges as a powerful force but not innocent of the erosion of agency and engagement that it seeks out to correct. The conversation between these two factions is often heated and confrontational. However, taking sides necessitates the production of Openness as a black box, where instead of being a method and an instrument to achieve larger principles and ideals, Openness becomes the very object of inquiry and the lens through which it is studied. We need to rescue Openness from this mystical status and map it at various levels of lived and embodied reality to produce it as an intersectional standpoint that addresses the promises and perils of Openness in education.
2018
Open education seeks to improve educational access, effectiveness, and equality. The term 'open educational practices' (OEP) describes practices that include the creation, use and reuse of open educational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies and open sharing of teaching practices. While open education at a macro level is regarded by many as a positive goal, complexity resides in determining and negotiating the value of open practice at an individual level, and structural and cultural barriers to openness persist within higher education. The goal of this research study was to understand whether, why, how, and to what extent individual educators used OEP, specifically with respect to teaching, and also to identify any shared characteristics among those who used OEP (i.e. 'open educators'). The study was conducted at a medium-sized, research-focused university in Ireland, without explicit policies on OER or OEP. The empirical study used a qualitative, interpretive, and critical approach in order to focus on participants' meaning-making and decision-making with respect to openness. Data was gathered from academic staff across a broad range of disciplines and all employment categories (i.e. permanent, non-permanent, full-time and part-time). Using constructivist grounded theory, a model of the concept 'Using OEP for teaching' was constructed to describe open educators' digital identities and digital practices, and the values and motives associated with decisions about whether to use OEP. The results of the study indicated little intentional use of OER and relatively low use of OEP. The four dimensions shared by open educators were: (i) balancing privacy and openness, (ii) developing digital literacies, (iii) valuing social learning, and (iv) challenging traditional teaching role expectations. The use of OEP by academic staff was found to be complex, personal, contextual, and continually negotiated. The study adds to a growing body of work on open educational practices and also provides evidence for policy makers and practitioners arguing for critical and context-specific approaches to open education.