How to explain "openness" in open education

The debate on “openness” has been one of the central issues open education folks has tackled - different people have different opinions regarding what constitutes "open" in open education. The recent survey by Babson group made me and others re-think the current status of OER (e.g. posts by Alek Tarkowski, David Wiley  and Phill Hill). Among many points that can be found important, perhaps the most significant one we have to address is about “openness” in today’s open education, which Alek critically argues in his post.

Babson group did a great job. They showed the “mystery” (in Alek's phrase) around the awareness and use of OER:

"While only about one-third of faculty members claim to be aware of open educational resources, nearly one-half report that they use OER. There are even some faculty who said that they were not all aware of OER who report that they have used it once the concept is explained for them."

This happens probably because some users do not realize that they are using “OER”. In other words, there are people who might be very good at utilizing free online resources and integrating those resources in their teaching but haven't thought about the name for those resources. Many OER researchers might have once encountered the difficulty of finding practitioners of OER or users of OER. As David Wiley pointed out five years ago, the “dark reuse” of OER has been the serious problem. Finding those who effectively use OER in their teaching and learning is very very hard.

This issue of unobservable OER users is a great loss for researchers as you can imagine, since there might be very great teachers or learners who effectively use OER to enhance the quality of their teaching and learning but cannot be found only because they don’t call what they are using “OER”. We filter them out when we search for OER users by putting keywords “OER” or “Open Educational Resources” into Google.

One of the underlying reasons for this is the vague definition of "open educational resources", which the Babson report faced when it developed their questionnaire:

"A critical issue in measuring the level of OER awareness is exactly how the question is worded. As the previous studies demonstrated, many academics have only a vague understanding of the details of what constitutes open educational resources. Others will confuse 'open' with 'free' and assume all free resources are OER. Still others will confuse 'open resources' with 'open source' and assume OER refers only to open source software. Because of these differing levels of understanding, the phrasing of the awareness question needs to be specific. The question should outline enough of the dimensions of OER to avoid the confusion, without being so detailed that the question itself educates the respondent sufficiently enough that they can claim to be 'aware.'” 

This ambiguity of what OER means makes us feel confused when we say about OER and OER users. Some may strongly state that “OER users” are those who integrate well-known materials such as OCW or Khan Academy into their teaching with his/her understanding of Creative Commons licenses. Others might note that if a person shows one CC-licensed photo in one of his/her slides in class, it becomes “the use of OER.” If both of these two are to be OER uses, is it reasonable to judge them as the same “OER use?” This kind of questions and vagueness around OER is always the case when I talk about OER to people in different fields. My wife, who previously taught English to Japanese children, once said to me, “I often refer to websites that illustrate how to develop educational materials and modify the idea to make it fit into my teaching style. Is this also the use of OER?”

The definition of OER relies much on what it means to be “open.” As the quote above points out, many faculty equate “open” with “free”. Keeping this kind of problem in mind, I strongly recommend reading TheBattle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory (free and CC-BY licensed!) by professor Martin Weller at Open University UK – I have only read it’s introductory parts so far but I really like it. There are many interesting arguments even in the introduction but I'm not going to introduce them here. Rather, I would like you to get the book (it's free!) and enjoy by yourself. It will definitely bring us thoughtful insights we need to re-think issues around “openness,” leading to the future in which we can further enhance the quality of pedagogical practices using OER/MOOC and innovate teaching and learning.