Who opens online distance education, to whom, and for what?

ABSTRACT

In the previous era of open educational practices (OEP) based around distance teaching, its actors and their target group were clear to define: open universities and disadvantaged learners. In this new era of OEP linked to digitalized open educational resources, there are multiple actors and beneficiaries of OEP. This critical literature review examined numerous scholarly narratives about OEP in online distance education, by asking a simple but important question: “Who opens online distance education, to whom, and for what?”. The results suggest that despite the growing importance on the social mission to make Education for All among diverse actors, clear understanding of the actual process of OEP in real-life higher education settings and clarity on how those actors actually serve disadvantaged learners are lacking. This article suggests that we refocus our OEP effort on opening higher education to the disadvantaged and collecting real-life stories of OEP and the disadvantaged.

KEYWORDS:

• open educational practices
• open educational resources
• online education
• distance education
• open university

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors of this special issue as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments that contributed to the present version of this article. Further, I wish to thank Brett Bligh for his constructive suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was declared by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kyungmee Lee

Kyungmee Lee is a lecturer in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, and co-Director of the Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning. Her research targets the intersection of online education, higher education, and international education. Kyungmee’s scholarship emphasizes concepts of discourse, knowledge, and power, understood through a broadly Foucauldian lens.