Photo by Alexandre Godreau on Unsplash
“Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge.” – What is Open Education?
My post this week was inspired by the articles:
Reflecting on the Impact of the Open Education Movement and Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability
My purpose for writing this post is to begin to explore open education more thoroughly, to look at debates around open education and to the determine the importance of it and the reasons for fighting to to keep it around. My feelings, after reading these two articles is that open education is important from a practical as well as a philosophical point of view and, it is important to keep around. If, in fact , the sustainability of open educational resources is in question as mentioned by the article, Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability what can be done to ensure its continued success?
As if my thoughts were somehow overheard by the Twitterverse, or is it Twittersphere?……. my twitter feed seemed to suddenly erupt with tweets connected to this very topic. Whether this was coincidental, the watching bots or, more likely that I was more attuned to anything that popped into my sphere connected to open learning is is yet to be discovered ; however, it did lead me to search Twitter for some open Ed resources I could follow. These are listed below.
I’m anticipating that my understanding around open access will broaden as a result of following these feeds; along with the associated websites/blogs.
I think that most would be hard pressed to argue against quality education for all, shared knowledge, reduced costs to students (open textbooks), richer and more diverse resources and the other benefits that come with the open movement; however, there are critics and, there are reasons why articles question the sustainability of openness. It appears that the largest issue connected to the open movement is money. If we are talking about someone’s livelihood, how do we ensure that the individual receives monetary compensation while still allowing for free access to quality materials/ resources? How do operating costs get paid? Where does the money come from?
I am curious to see what will transpire in the future.