Openness in content, data, government, and access is influencing organizations of all types. Education is influenced heavily: open educational resources and open teaching hold potential to disrupt the full spectrum of education: policy, learning development, delivery, and accreditation. This course will offer a detailed overview of the history of openness in education, current trends including legal and technological developments, as well as future directions.
Through review of literature, participation in group discussions, online lectures, and related open education resources, students will be able to:
- Define openness in an educational context and describe its various instantiations in different educational sectorsIdentify the potential of openness to contribute to systemic change in higher education and policy
- Plan, search, deploy, and integrate open educational resources (OERs) from design to delivery phases of learning
- Analyze current research views on how openness influences higher education enrolment, course design costs, and the distinctions between peer-developed resources (“crowd sourcing”) and centrally curated resources (expert).
- Describe the history of openness in education (including early literature on open universities in the 1960’s) and detail the impact of technological developments on openness
- Evaluate prominent intellectual property and copyright systems, detailing the influence of each on scholarship.