29.1 Systems for supportive open teaching

Here are some ideas that I have been mulling over lately. They also follow on well from the recent contributions from Martin Weller around exploring new ways of being open and Cole Camplese on embedding student expectations.

Education is a process that generally involves learners, teachers and sets of educational resources that can be mediating artifacts in the educational process, arranged in some structured way (see Lane, 2008a). It is a purposeful human activity where education is the main purpose. Learning can also occur in non-educational settings when it is better described as a purposive activity where it is useful to describe it as educational even though that may not be the primary purpose of that activity (lifelong learning or the University of Life?). In the latter case there are learners but no obvious teachers or educational resources as the learners draw upon many different people and things in their social or working environments.

I set out these thumbnail sketches of systems for describing educational experiences to pose the question what are the main properties of the components of such systems and the practices expected of people involved when we put open in front of them? What do we mean by open education, open learning, open teaching and open educational resources?

Open education has got a lot of attention lately with the series of Open Education conferences , the Cape Town Declaration on open education and recent books such as one I have contributed to called Opening Up Education . Wikipedia defines open education as a collective term that refers to forms of education in which knowledge ideas or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure are shared over the internet. That seems to rather dismiss pre-internet activity and I go along with what I say in my chapter in the aforementioned book (Lane, 2008b) that openness has many dimensions but is about removing barriers to education.

Open learning has been a phrase used for some time as well with a Journal of Open and Distance Learning and the Open University in the UK basing its work on a supported open learning model . Again a significant aspect of open learning is about removing barriers to learners engaging with educational experiences and I have talked about that elsewhere (Lane, 2008c).

Open educational resources are even more topical and talked about starting with the definition given at a UNESCO workshop (UNESCO 2002) through to the large funding program from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where they also see OERs as being one way to help transform teaching and learning. A central feature of OERs is an open license that allows and encourages sharing, reuse and remixing (and probably influences the current Wikipedia entry for open education).