The case for open educational practice

In his recent book The Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why it Doesn’t Feel Like Victory, Weller (2014) explores why despite the considerable gains made in relation to advocacy, funding and policy development around openness especially in higher education, there are few signs of celebration and no sense of a victory (p. 3). I believe that a large part of the reason for this is the failure of its advocates to see openness as part of a bigger agenda incorporating many other dimensions of learning and teaching as opposed to a rather narrow focus on free and open access to educational resources (see http://bit.ly/1eFsomt) as its key defining characteristic. The latter is a jaundiced view of openness, however evangelical it is made out to be.

While the economic arguments for free access to educational resources (i.e., at no cost to the user) are defensible, particularly in light of an education for all agenda, the arguments for open access (i.e., the right to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute) are still unsettled, and not only because that is not how learners and teachers usually go about using educational resources (see Allen & Seaman, 2014; see also Wiley, 2016). Authors and developers of educational resources must have had a very good reason to put it together in the way they did in the first place. And users do not always want to rip apart an educational resource and revise or remix it before it is of any use to them. Besides, much of what users would want to do to existing educational resources would be permissible under fair use laws anyway (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use). Of course there are advantages in being able to adapt educational resources to suit one’s context and needs, but as Baggaley and James point out from their experiences with online education, such activity can run the risk of misinterpretation and misrepresentation which can have serious consequences for novice learners in particular (see Baggaley & James, “The fog of online learning,” this issue).

But I am not about mounting a case here to diminish the value of open educational resources or openness in any way at all. What I am building here is a strong and robust case for seeing both these concepts within the context of a broader and much richer interpretation of open educational practice. When this has been achieved, only then we will be able to celebrate and claim victory.

Open educational practice comprises a lot more than free and open access to educational resources, although that is most certainly an important part of it. Open education is best seen as an omnibus term that has many dimensions including the following critical attributes:

(1)	Open access: Inclusive and equal access to educational opportunities without barriers such as entry qualifications and ability to pay. Value principle: All lives have equal value.
(2)	Open learning: Ability to study and learn at anytime, anywhere and at any pace. Value principle: Freedom and the flexibility to choose the mode, medium, time, place and pace of study.
(3)	Open scholarship: Releasing educational resources under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others. Value principle: Education is a basic need that should be accessible to all, if we were to achieve education for all towards a path to real freedom, justice and equality (see Sen, 1999).

This journal has a long and rich history of publishing articles that have been investigating and exploring all of these dimensions of open educational practice, and the current crop of articles in this issue is no exception. In the first article, “Who am I as a distance tutor? An investigation of distance tutors’ professional identity in China,” Junhong Xiao explores issues around the professional identity and identify formation of tutors in open universities in China. The role of the tutor has always been critical to learning and teaching in conventional open and distance learning contexts. And with the growth of online education and models of learning and teaching such as the OERuniversity (see Witthaus, 2012), this role in supporting student learning is becoming even more critical. See for instance in this issue the reflection “Themes at the intersections of theory and practice in online and blended education,” by Antonina Lukenchuk, capturing one tutor’s experiences with doctoral education in the online and blended world. In these open learning contexts, tutors are the real face of teachers and teaching, and the first point of call for students who are studying away from the university campus, at their own pace, place and time. Without the support that such tutors provide, and which often extends beyond the subject matter, alienation and a lack of engagement with their learning poses a serious threat to many students often leading to attrition from the program.

The quality of tutors and tutor support are not the only stressors for learners in open education contexts. Learning at a distance from the educational organization, alone, and at one’s own pace and place requires a great deal of fortitude, time management and organizational skills, more so than what might be adequate in conventional face-to-face educational settings. The article by Lisa Beccaria, Cath Rogers, Lorelle Burton, and Gavin Beccaria, “Role of health-promoting behaviours for on-campus and distance education students,” explores this phenomenon among both on-campus and off-campus students. Their study found that the relationships between stress, strain and coping, and academic outcomes in the two groups of students were similar and that there are ways in which these stressors can be dealt with effectively. How one group of learners deal with the demands of the networked learning landscape is the subject of the next article by Marguerite Koole and Sarah Stack, “Doctoral students’ Identity positioning in networked learning environments.” This study shines a light on the challenges faced by a particular student cohort and is not unlike that shone by Junhong Xiao in his study of distance education tutors in China. Such studies offer useful insights, both in terms of the foci and targets of their investigations, as well as the research methods they employed to do so, into the lived experiences of learners and tutors in open education contexts.

From these studies, I am tempted to ask if existence in a networked learning environment is any different in terms of its character and formation than it is in conventional face-to-face educational settings. Is the development and formation of partnerships, friendships, and community among learners any different in the two educational settings? If so, then how are they different, and what factors are responsible for their development in different ways? Why is there an apparently greater interest in studying the growth of communities in networked learning environments than in conventional face-to-face educational settings? These are interesting questions that arise from the research that is reported by Alison Fields, Kwok-Wing Lai, John Gibbs, Alex Kirk, and Jenny Vermunt in their article, “The transformation of an online learning community from an organised facility to an organic fraternity.” In this article, the authors explore how an organised learning community developed for an explicit educational need transformed itself into an ongoing fraternity of peers. Was this unexpected or unique? And how was this different from the many ongoing and lasting friendships that develop after a period of study in a conventional face-to-face educational setting?

And if you thought for a second, that learning on your own was challenging enough, try group work, and especially group work online. The article by Bo Chang and Haijun Kang, “Challenges facing group work online,” explores this phenomenon, offering some useful tips on what teachers and learners can do to better manage group work and to ensure a satisfying learning experience online. Some of these tips include working with manageable numbers, using peer evaluation, working with clear protocols and guidelines for communication, using effective tools to support group work, and perhaps more importantly, nurturing a sense of ownership and autonomy in the group, something that is also underscored by the article by Po-Hsuan Chen and Olusola Adesope, “The effects of need satisfaction on EFL online learner satisfaction.” In this article the authors identified the prominent role that autonomy, competence, and relatedness played in predicting online learner satisfaction.

Student voice is an integral part of this sense of empowerment in online learning, and mostly because of its non-contiguous nature. The article by Genevieve Marie Johnson and Audrey Cooke, “Self-regulation of learning and preference for written versus audio-recorded feedback by distance education students,” explores this line of inquiry in looking at the relationships between distance education students sense of self-regulation and their preferences for tutor feedback delivered in audio-recorded versus written form. While this study found a preference among students for written feedback over audio-recorded feedback, it concluded that tutor feedback should be provided in a variety of formats because the overall picture is a lot more complicated one for anyone channel of communication to be considered sufficient.

In relation to open educational practices then, it so happens that this crop of articles is all about issues to do with open learning. And that tells us something about where the research interest is currently on open educational practice. We would welcome articles on issues, challenges and controversies confronting all aspects of open educational practice, including open access and open scholarship, topics on which we have published extensively before. Meanwhile enjoy these.

Som Naidu
Executive Editor
[email protected]