Contributed by Nadia Cheikrouhou

Equity is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.”

Frances Wright

Amidst the first outbreak of the CoronaVirus pandemic, my university shifted to remote teaching. During that period I attended two international conferences: the OER20 conference, which moved to an online and free format, and the Open Education 20 conference, which wasn’t free but offered scholarships to participants residing in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, or Pacific Islands. Since I am from Africa, I applied for and received a scholarship. During both conferences, I was exposed to many open initiatives and I was fascinated by the number of projects and collaborations between different institutions in the OER field . Additionally, while OER was an important theme for the western world, in my country, Tunisia, it is not. I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth because I felt that we are lagging behind the Open Education movement despite its potential in terms of equity, accessibility, skill acquisition and collaboration.

Since then, my interest in open education has grown and I participated in the ONL Course, which was an open online course organized by four Swedish universities: Lund, Linköping, Karlstad and Linnaeus. The course discussed open online teaching and learning and also included individual reflections in an open blog. It was my first experience blogging, which encouraged me to contribute to this blog. I believe that openness for educators starts by being open to new opportunities, new experiences, and new adventures. 

During the ONL course, we had a lot of resources to read and one particular book that I liked was “The Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why it Doesn’t Feel Like a Victory” by Martin Weller because it showed some hidden aspects of the open education movement. We hear a lot about the virtues of openness but what are the criticisms and issues surrounding openness? In 2013, Christensen, et al.conducted an online survey of students enrolled in at least one of the University of Pennsylvania’s 32 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered on the Coursera platform. They found that participants in these MOOCs tend to be young, well educated, and employed, with a majority of males and from developed countries. MOOCs are therefore not reaching individuals without access to higher education in developing countries. According to Liyanagunawardena, et al. (2013) barriers of access, language and digital literacy among others make MOOCs an unviable solution for education for a large proportion of people in developing countries. MOOCs may therefore serve only the ‘privileged’ in developing countries who already have ‘access to digital technologies and international language learning (Liyanagunawardena et al., 2011).

Open Access publishing is another form of open education that means that scientific research is accessible to anyone who can read it, download it and use it with the obligation to give credit to the author(s). If we endorse the narrative that research is a public good, then it should be disseminated freely to anyone; unfortunately we are far from this reality. I often can’t go beyond the abstracts of many published papers either because they ask for institutional access or payment to remove the paywall. New researchers or small universities with limited budgets or fundings couldn’t afford subscriptions to international journals or the Article/Author/Access Processing Charges (APCs) that some publishers charge to make articles openly available. This leads “…to a situation in which ironically openness may lead to elitism” (Weller, 2014).

Now what about Open Educational Resources (OER)? OER have a central role to play in contributing to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 (from the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs): to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” The term OER was adopted in 2002 at a forum organized by UNESCO and in 2012 the first World OER Congress was held in Paris that “emphasised using OER as a means of providing equal access to knowledge”. In preparation for the 2nd World OER Congress (2017), the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) organized six regional consultations to identify the status of OER and discuss challenges to mainstreaming it. The report mentions that the most significant barrier to mainstreaming OER is the lack of users’ capacity to access, reuse, and share OER. According to the same report, funding is still required to promote and drive OER efforts, and while access to information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure – a prerequisite for OER development – is improving in many regions, further work is required to bridge the digital divide. The same report noted that most research on the use of OER and its impact was in Australia and the United States. To bridge the gap with the global south, the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) research network was established in 2013 to better understand the adoption and impact of OER in selected countries in many parts of the world. Likewise, the Open Med project (2015-2018), supported by the European Union, aimed to raise awareness and facilitate the adoption of OER and OEP (Open Education Practices) in South-Mediterranean countries. 

In general, many barriers such as access to technology, language, computer literacy, fear and reluctance of educators, and cultural barriers may result in “Open Education serving only the privileged or those with high expertise and/or isn’t reaching the people it claims” (Weller, 2014). Being aware of these barriers and recognizing these issues in the first place is very important to taking positive actions to make the open spaces not only open but accessible and inclusive as Lorna M.Campbell stated in her article The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation (Lorna M.Campbell, 2018).That’s why it’s important to ask ourselves who is in and who is out of the open spaces, and why?  I would ultimately relate to what Amira Dhalla, who was leading Mozilla’s Women and Web Literacy programs, wrote in 2018 in her article, “The dangers of being open”– “So what happens when we realize open is only understood or used by certain people? We see all the people who aren’t included. These people who might benefit most from what the movement has to offer but can’t see themselves part of the movement or don’t understand how to join or even worse, don’t see the value in joining. To help these people we need to start meeting them where they are and allowing opportunities for a greater diversity of people to join the movement. We need leaders of diverse backgrounds. We need champions who can represent or work with the voices missing and actively work on solutions to bringing more people into the mission” (Dhalla, 2018)

References:

Christensen, G., Steinmetz, A., Alcorn, B., Bennett, A., Woods, D. and Emanuel, E. (2013) ‘The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why?’ SSRN:  https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2350964

COL (2017). Open Educational Resources: Global Report 2017. Burnaby: COL http://hdl.handle.net/11599/2788

Hodgkinson-Williams, C. & Arinto, P. B. (2017). Adoption and impact of OER in the Global South. Cape Town & Ottawa: African Minds, International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1005330 http://hdl.handle.net/11427/26682

Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Adams, A. A., Rassool, N., & Williams, S. (2011). Extending higher educational opportunities through e-Learning: a case study from Sri Lanka. Paper presented at the 1st International Australasian Conference on Enabling Access to Higher Education, Adelaide, Australia,pp. 291-302 http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/23842/

Liyanagunawardena, T., Williams, S. and Adams, A. (2013) The impact and reach of MOOCs:a developing countries’ perspective. eLearning Papers (33), 1-8. ISSN 1887-1542 http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/32452/

Weller, M (2014) The Battle For Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press. https://doi.org/10.5334/bam

Wimpenny, K., Merry, S.K., Tombs, G. & Villar–Onrubia, D. (eds) (2016), Opening Up Education in South Mediterranean Countries: A Compendium of Case Studies and Interviews with Experts about Open Educational Practices and Resources. OpenMed, ISBN 978–1–84600–0 http://openmedproject.eu/results/compendium/

Nadia Cheikhrouhou is a lecturer at the Higher Institute of Technological Studies of Béja, Tunisia. She is the chair of the steering committee of ISET Béja Innovation Awards (An entrepreneurial competition for students) and a member of the strategic planning committee of the OpenEd conference.

This post is by Nadia Cheikhrouhou and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.