On the role of openness in education

It’s an hour for me to be one of first authors of the brand new journal Open Praxis with the paper „On the role of openness in education“ that I have written together with my colleague Sandra Peters (University of Technology Sydney). It covers much of her PHD work on the historical research in education. Based on this we go on to argue

After a period of open movements many times there have been slight but important shifts from “pure” openness towards “pretended” openness, i.e. some aspects have been modified to offer more control for producers and other stakeholders. For instance, the historic culture of the coffeehouses had been transformed to private clubs and closed, exclusive societies. The original MOOC concept has been utilised for the development of platforms like Udacity or Coursera both of which are providing free courses containing material that cannot be adapted according to the 4Rs (see above). Similarly, Open Study is a for profit platform. History emphasizes the risk in failing to preserve the openness that made initiatives successful in the first place. The development of free but not entirely open courses needs to be examined more closely. While not immediately altering public perception, the shift from humanistic values to more “efficient” and “productive” educational opportunities can undermine the significance of openness.

Full text is available here. Looking for your comments.