Questions for Open Education

I’m starting to write a book chapter on Open Education and have been thinking about its meaning as a movement, like other social movements. Earlier today, I was reading The Rocky Road to a Real Transition. The Transition Town’s Movement and What it Means for Social Change. This is a constructive critique of the Transition Towns movement. I recommend reading the ‘Rocky Road’ booklet as it asks a number of questions that are applicable to any movement that advocates positive social change. From reading the booklet, I’ve pulled out some questions we might similarly ask of the Open Education movement. What do you think? I’ll try to offer some answers in this book chapter I’m writing…

  • What is Open Education attempting to transform? Towards what, from where?
  • What can we learn from other historical and existing models of organising (social) change?
  • What is the historical and political context of Open Education?
  • To what extent is Open Education for radical social change and not simply about change within the existing boundaries of education?
  • Is Open Education apolitical? Can it be? How effective can depoliticised movements be?
  • To what extent is the Open Education movement really facing up to the issues of social inequality?
  • How does Open Education resist neo-liberal government policies and how is it being co-opted by government/private funding bodies as a way to maintain economic and political business-as-usual?
  • Do we recognise that we are complicit in the problems we are critical of? Is it a self-reflexive movement?
  • How does the liberalisation of educational resources (OER) serve the liberalisation of the knowledge economy?
  • To what extent does Open Education present a real challenge to the existing forms of education? Or rather, to what extent can Open Education be ignored?
  • How do the objectives of Open Education tie into the objectives of other movements for social change? Are we working together?
  • Creating alternatives to the status quo is one method of introducing change but to what extent does Open Education resist and challenge mainstream education?
  • Are our institutions resilient and sustainable? How can Open Education contribute to sustainability? How might Open Education be vulnerable to the unsustainability of institutions?