Openness in Education: Claims, Concepts, and Perspectives for Higher Education

Theo Hug

doi:10.7577/seminar.2308

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Since about 15 years, we find a variety of initiatives dealing with open education (OE), open educational resources (OER), and Creative Commons (CC) licenses
We find a wide range of OE and OER initiatives as well as diverse kinds of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) all over the world
Notions of open education are often linked to notions of open access, open society and free culture, open source and Free/Libre Open Source Software (F/LOSS), open science and knowledge commons, open government and open innovation, as well as further related notions

Summary

At the Crossroads of Openness and Education

Characteristics and motives of openness can be found in many respects in the context of education. Assignment of responsibilities and competencies is being done, for example, in the context of innovation management within universities, mostly the respective activities show characteristics of re-acting or re-structuring and hardly characteristics of redesigning, re-framing, or-generating according to possible modes of coping with change (cf Peschl & Fundneider 2008) It must remain an open question at this point, how and to what extent the ongoing activities in academic “Third Spaces” are complicating, obstructing, supporting or opening up perspectives for which areas of academic research and higher education. Openness is the opposite of saying ‘nothing matters’ because possibilities are considered open only insofar as they are found to be worth pursuing.” (Hoy 2004, p. 232)

Conclusions

Short CV