Open Education Roadmap

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Introduction

A roadmap for Open Education in the Swiss Higher Education landscape has been drafted in 2021-2022. The output is available from this page. It is currently available in pdf format but will soon be available in wiki format for easy editing and commenting.

Within a SNSF scientific exchange, Swiss and international scholars have been working for 9 months on an Open Education project, driven by three aims:

• Draft a roadmap for Open Education in the Swiss Higher Education landscape to set an initial ground and open discussions to stakeholders, citizens and communities;
• Identify key stakeholders, ready to act as change agents in Swiss Higher Education institutions (HEIs) and take on leadership roles with regard to Open Education;
• Start a Swiss Open Education network to share and coordinate future actions.

What is Open Education? How is it related to Open Science and other Opens and Commons? Why does it matter for Higher Education institutions? Why does Open Education matter for each and every citizen?

This report provides an overview of Open Education to decision makers through these 4 questions and sets the ground to invite stakeholders, citizens and communities to actively contribute to the debate.

What is Open Education?

Many definitions of Open Education exist (e.g. Year of Open; Stracke, 2019, p. 184 “Open Education is designing, realizing, and evaluating learning opportunities with visionary, operational, and legal openness to improve learning quality for the learners”): and this diversity is characteristic of its openness. Below is a tentative definition of how we understand it today and a visual representation of its main characteristics (Figure 1).

Open Education is both an umbrella term and a complex ecosystem that operates on a number of very different levels. It is inherently open in the way it functions and cannot be captured by a single definition. It considers knowledge as a common good. Its intrinsic values of freedom and transparency assure contribution and access to the discovering of all forms of knowledge, under the sole condition of respecting authorisation to access it, e.g. indigenous knowledge. It is articulated around the remaining values of responsibility, sharing, justice, agency and ubiquitous ownership (Baker, 2017). It is neither synonymous of free nor of extractive approaches. It strives to find sustainable models at all levels – epistemic, legal, social, economic, political, ecologic, infrastructure, etc. Open Education represents an alternative approach that exists since the Middle Ages and is at the heart of the establishment of European universities (see for ex. Peter & Deimann, 2013, p. 9). It is a means (Paola Corti, 2022, private communication) to foster knowledge societies by leveraging collective human intelligence.

Figure 1: Visual representation of some characteristics of Open Education

How is Open Education related to Open Science and other Opens and Commons?

Openness is not binary, i.e. on/off and is best understood on a continuum. As a conceptual tool, we may distinguish 3 types of practices on this continuum that can be entangled: closed, semi-open and open. We make this choice because the dualism open-closed does not exist per se (Hilton et al., 2010; Wiley, 2009, No date).

Open Education is one component of the Open Ecosystem. To give an idea of the breadth and depth of this ecosystem, the metaphor of the tree by Stacey (2018) is insightful and sets the direction, with elements that are already bearing fruits, e.g. Open Science, Open Source Software, and others which are germinating, e.g. Open Institutions, Open Education Data.

The Swiss higher education landscape seeks to ground Openness and has already adopted national policies for Open Access and Open Research Data. In addition, some HEIs have a policy for Open Educational Resources (OER), e.g. Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, Pädagogische Hochschule Bern. Swissuniversities, within its P8 programme funds the Swiss Digital Skills Academy which promotes OER and Open platforms. Reports are available (e.g. Gutknecht et al., 2020; Neumann et al., 2022) and interest groups on Open Educational Resources exist.

Education is at a crossroads striving for more social oriented forms with collaborative practices and commoning perceived as opportunities to move forward (Le Crosnier, 2017). Switzerland is a fertile ground to revive and reinvent commoning because it can build on its historical background with natural commons. Commoning represents also a very interesting political structure that empowers citizens and communities (Haller et al., 2021). This is important because political choices do influence HEIs’ path and are critical in terms of bifurcations (Kauko, 2014). In addition, it makes sense that main actors, i.e. citizens and communities, for whom education is being designed are involved in bargaining powers. Education is considered an information commons and can benefit from the experience with natural commons management.

Why does Open Education matter for Higher Education institutions?

Higher Education institutions (HEI) have 3 missions: teaching, research and service to the society[1]. In their recent history, HEIs were founded on the Humboldtian model of combining holistically research and teaching (De Meulemeester, 2011). In the Global North, research has been predominant in the last decades, and logically, Openness has arrived through this mission, reviving Open Science. The World Wide Web has been primarily created to exchange research data and results among researchers worldwide (CERN, No date) leveraging values of Openness founded in the Middle Ages (David, 1998; Langlais, 2015).

Today, HEIs evolve in complex international and national power structures and have to consider and negotiate with a variety of international organisations like the UN, EU, OECD, WEF, GAFAM, etc. (e.g. for Portugal, see  Santos et Kauko, 2022). Within this extraordinary entanglement of power structures, we try to capture some elements for each of the 3 missions of HEIs, demonstrating with the blue font that threads of Openness do already exist and Open Education can benefit from it to grow (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The 3 missions of Higher Education institutions and power relationships with a thread of Open elements (in blue) – inspired from FOSTER (2018); Stacey (2018) and Weller et al. (2018)

Suggesting a Roadmap for Open Education in the Swiss Higher Education landscape

In this section, we present the roadmap. The following sections explain how we proceeded to reach this outcome.  

An overall framework and operating conditions for the roadmap provides enabling contexts. Three strategic focus organise then the roadmap, each containing four actions as detailed below.

Overall framework and operating conditions for the roadmap: Enabling legal, societal, political, economic and institutional ecosystems to support Openness and a renewed approach to Commons.

Strategic focus 1: Broad horizon education Action 1: Be knowledgeable of one's own cultural contexts and develop a robust critical and multi-perspective historical memory. Action 2: Accept, respect and find bridges with other knowledge systems in the pursuit of deep cultural, epistemic, social and racial justice. Action 3: Create a context for education with global equity and guarantee participation in Knowledge creation processes worldwide. Action 4: Open the governance of Education to alternative systems that foreground humans and communities, e.g. Buen vivir & Buen conocer, Ubuntu approach, First Nations culture. Strategic focus 2: Ethical and responsible use of technology Action 1: Use collective intelligence to put technology at the service of the public good. Action 2: Use technology in responsible and intelligent ways in order to develop truly cutting-edge technology. Reserve it for what can only be done with technology for evident sustainability issues. Action 3: Raise awareness about techno-coloniality, techno-utopia and the pharmakon role that technology plays to free humans from non-productive considerations towards technology. Action 4: Develop smart collaboration between humans and technology and not a fusion. Strategic focus 3: Humans reconnected to the planet’s ecosystem Action 1: Raise awareness of humans’ responsibility in the preservation of our planet’s ecosystem and all its species, including humans.  Action 2: Discover the variation of understandings of how Nature can be perceived according to the diversity of knowledge systems. Action 3: Renovate education to adopt an eco-responsible perspective with well-thought uses of energies. Action 4: Leverage co-creation and recycling to break with current consumerist, extractivist and planned scarcity models.

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[1] To what extent can Openness and specifically Open Science, Open Education and Open Innovation represent an opportunity for HEI to reconnect with their founding mission of democratising knowledge?

For instance, it is explicitly written in the University Act of the University of Geneva: Art.2 "Elle informe le public et contribue à la réflexion sur l’évolution des connaissances et leur impact sur la société et l’environnement. » Art3. « L’université contribue à la démocratisation du savoir et promeut l’égalité des chances » https://silgeneve.ch/legis/data/rsg_c1_30.htm .

The same goes for the University of Basel in its strategy 2022-2030: ““Opening up the university” refers to the aspiration to expand cooperation with partner institutions, maintain close contacts with politics, business and society, and make an active contribution to the social and cultural life of the region”.

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