Abstract

Open education awareness and adoption are two topics that have been researched with a particular emphasis on teacher professional development (TPD) as an important basis for the promotion of the two (Bonafini, 2017; Hodgkinson-Williams, & Arinto, 2017; Kennedy & Laurillard, 2019; Misra, 2018; Nikolaos & Athanassios, 2017; Sezgin, 2020; Trust & Pektas, 2019). As teachers are the most important component of the education ecosystem, implementation of open education must take root with teachers starting from teacher training. Teacher Professional Development which includes pre-service and in-service programmes are targeted at teacher’s capacity development and continued improvement for better delivery of service. Open education models which include Open Access, Open Education Resources (OER), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and Open Scholarship have been used in teacher training context prior to 2020 but, there was a surge of the use and implementation of open education models as an intervention strategy to train and equip teachers for alternative means of teaching and instruction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Open education is therefore appropriately fitting to answer the demand of keeping teachers up-to-date in the face of disruption and dynamism like pandemic, changing technology etc. In spite of these developments, several teachers, education systems and the education community across the world have not come to the full grasp of the capacity and potentials of open education. This research therefore seeks evidential analysis and research to showcase the problem with awareness and adoption. Two open education models adopted for this investigation are Open Education Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Several existing bodies of knowledge of these models were analyzed. Additionally, this research critically considered a couple of open TPD programmes that emanated during the pandemic using surveys, interviews and metadata. Both historical and current analysis were juxtaposed to discover trends. The result of the investigation provided a series of discoveries with the implementation patterns of MOOC and OER. There are also some peculiar issues that emanated in the research that should be considered in the open education community of practice (CoP) in order to better engage educators across every level of education. The research figured out that implementation is key, when handled effectively, to widespread awareness and adoption of open education.