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H818 Unit 2 Activity 2.3 Researching openness in education

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Edited by Anna Carolyn Page, Sunday, 27 Oct 2019, 08:19

In response to the Jordan & Weller's 2017 ‘beginners guide’ summarising topics in openness and education, I chose Open Education in Schools and Open Access publishing to investigate as I was less familiar with the Open Education in Schools research and although I know a bit about Open Access publishing (especially as I helped with JIME for a while), I didn't know much about the origins of the movement or its impact.

Open Education in Schools

who is/are the main spokesperson(s) for this initiative

The first spokesperson appears to be Ronald Barth (1969) who called for a “more formalised definition of Open Education” in schools, in light of the Plowden report about primary school education in the 1960s. The nine assumptions mentioned in the summary of the beginner’s guide by Jordan & Weller weren’t specifically listed in this abstract, only the practices upon which assumptions were built. (I wanted to read more but was only able to access the abstract from his 1969 paper as the OU Athens login wasn’t allowing me access to the whole digitised version of the paper on the publisher’s website, very frustrating, but links rather neatly to the issues which prompted OA publishing). Barth wanted to strengthen open education practice by underpinning it with well researched theory; his call informed the “tone of research” (Jordan & Weller, 2017) in the following years.

where the research and activity around it is occurring

Self-directed learning and social interactions in learning were explored by Illich in a 1971 book called ‘Deschooling Society’ – a critique of formal, institutional learning. It has apparently been influential for the other themes of open learning.

Walberg & Thomas carried out research via a survey (UK and US) in 1972 to characterise the differences between open and traditional classrooms (following on from Barth), they found five differences in their eight criteria: provisioning, humaneness, diagnosis, instruction and evaluation.

In the same year Traub et al also developed a survey which explored the difficulties of researching open education effectively. Their criteria included setting objectives, materials and activities, physical environment, personalisation of learning, teacher role and student control. Open education in schools related to both classroom space layout and learning design.

Resnick’s paper of 1972 explored the perceived tensions between educational technology and the “humanistic values of Open Education” (Jordan & Weller, 2017), noting that educational technology could support open education in 6 ways: “choosing educational objectives, organization and sequencing materials, displaying alternatives, providing learner control, enhancing motivation, and evaluating competence.” (Jordan & Weller, 2017).

why it appears to have happened when it has, and in this form (which are the apparent drivers and motivators)

This was happening nearly 50 years ago, mainly in the UK and USA, in what appears to be a response to the 1967 Plowden report as well as various publications by the National Froebel Foundation and the growing interest in classroom and learning design and need for research in those areas.

what product(s) or progress is/are apparent

Those earlier papers have been cited more recently (Hyland 1979, Horwitz 1979, Giaconia & Hedges 1982, Baker 2017) in relation to open education in classrooms but this cluster is quite distinct from the others, especially as it was pre-internet, and focussed on classroom layout and learning design in face-to-face settings.

how these might connect now, or in the future, with learning and teaching activity

In the light of new technology tools and approaches being used in school education now (mobile learning, citizen science) while teachers who have a heavy administrative load have little time to participate in research around the use of such technologies in school settings, it is worth investigating what ‘open’ practices now happen in school settings and how the definition has shifted since the 1970s. The purpose would be to evaluate the extent to which is it possible and prudent to integrate such practices in schools and compare this to the definitions and assumptions about open education in schools 50 years ago.

 

Open Access publishing

who is/are the main spokesperson(s) for this initiative

The article by S Lawrence in Nature (2001) drew attention to an early study on the citations of OA papers, showing much higher citations for OA articles than closed access journals. This was built upon by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 which outlined two main principles for OA: self-archiving and OA journals. Further work in citation impact was done by Hajjim et al (2005) who conducted a 10 year analysis of scholarly impact of OA journals.

The OA movement appears to have emerged in the 1990s as research libraries and other organisations sought to find ways to make scholarly research more accessible, with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) being formed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1997.

More recently Martin Weller has blogged about OA publishing several times from 2014-2017 https://blog.edtechie.net/category/open-access/.

where the research and activity around it is occurring

Laakso et al’s study of 15 years of OA growth systematically compared earlier research of scholarly journal growth (3.5% annually for 300 years) and pace of growth in total number of articles published in that period of 3% annually to the growth of OA journals from 1993-2009 (18%) and OA article publication (30%) in that period, a quite startling contrast.

why it appears to have happened when it has, and in this form (which are the apparent drivers and motivators)

The apparent drivers and motivators for the growth of the OA movement were identified in Harnad et al (2004) article two main barriers to OA: the huge expense of journals to HE (whose academic staff largely provide the content to the publishers and educational libraries buy subscriptions) and how this limits access to potentially ground-breaking research to the select few who can afford to pay or who have access through an educational organisation which has paid, even though the research may have been publicly funded.

what product(s) or progress is/are apparent

The analysis by Laakso et al charts the rapid growth of OA journals from 1993-2009, drawing upon the Directory of Open Access Journals for its source material, the abstract of the study divides the period into 3 distinct periods: “the Pioneering years (1993–1999), the Innovation years (2000–2004), and the Consolidation years (2005–2009)” (Laakso et al 2011).

how these might connect now, or in the future, with learning and teaching activity

OA publishing has influence on open practices around digital scholarship, making the conduct and results of some HE research activities and outputs freely available, including to those involved in teaching. There is the potential for OA to assist with informing and underpinning teaching practice with research theory more equitably. It can also be used to teach “students, trainees and faculty” how to “edit, manage and publish” (Halevi 2018) if educational organisations run OA publications as a means to provide hands-on experience of scholarly publishing practices. This could be done using Open Textbooks.

Academics need to develop an understanding of the different publishing models for Open Access (Green and Gold) and the various permutations within Gold which make it viable yet equitable. This is outlined in Open Access Publishing at https://core.ac.uk/reader/45443539 (Dawson & Cosson, 2016).

References:

Barth, R.S. (1969) Open education - Assumptions about learning. Educational
Philosophy & Theory, 1(2), 29-39

Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) (2002) Read the Budapest Open
Access Initiative. BOAI website.

Dawson, R. & Cosson, M. (2016) Open Access Publishing, Lincoln University Research Archive (online). Available at https://core.ac.uk/reader/45443539 (accessed 27 October 2019)

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. & Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-year cross- disciplinary
comparison of the growth of Open Access and how it increases research
citation impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 28(4), 39-47.

Halevi, G. (2018) ‘Institutional Open Access Publishing as an Educational Vehicle’, Publishing Research Quarterly. New York: Springer US, 34(4), pp. 510–514. doi: 10.1007/s12109-018-9608-x.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y.,
Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H. & Hilf, E. (2004) The access/impact
problem and the green and gold roads to Open Access. Serials Review, 30,
(4).

Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling society. New York: Harper & Row

Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017) Openness and Education: A beginner’s guide. Global OER Graduate Network.

Laakso, M., Welling, P., Bukvova, H. & Nyman, L. (2011) The development of
open access journal publishing from 1993 to 2009.PLoSONE, doi:
10.1371/journal.pone.0020961

Lawrence, S. (2001) Free online availability substantially increases a paper's
impact. Nature, 411(521).

Resnick, L. (1972) Open education: Some tasks for technology. Educational
Technology, 12(1), 70-76

Traub, R.E., Weiss, J., Fisher, C.W. & Musella, D. (1972) Closure on
openness: Describing and quantifying open education. Interchange, 3(2-3), 69-
84.

Walberg, H.J. & Thomas, S.C. (1972) Open education: an operational
definition and validation in Great Britain and the U.S.A. American Educational
Research Journal, 9(2), 197-208

Weller, M. (n.d). Edtechie blog posts on Open Access (online). Available at https://blog.edtechie.net/category/open-access/ (accessed 27 October 2019)

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