The open education movement is both high profile and widely spread, yet definitions for just what open might mean in the context of education remain multiple, encompassing technical specifications for accessibility (Wiley 2014), licensing requirements for educational materials (Creative Commons, n.d.), the establishment of scholarly networks (Stewart 2015), or the community-building activities of lifelong learners (Bali et al. 2015). These various perspectives are regularly collected together under a general category of open education, in which openness often tends to be portrayed as a general condition that can endure over time, as well as migrate across geographical distances. However, important questions about the limits of the term remain. For example, in what sense can we understand education to become open and to remain so over time? How can the open education movement be considered global, that is, to span various continents with a unified idea of openness? These dilemmas relate directly to the practical concerns of how to design or teach an open course, where important decisions need to be made about the character and extent of the openness one might structure into the organization of resources or the arrangement of pedagogical activities.
Without a careful consideration of the meaning of openness, it is difficult to discern exactly what the condition of open education might be. The open education movement in general has tended to lack consistent theoretical foundations (Deimann and Farrow 2013; Oliver 2015), tacitly relying on what Knox (2013a) has framed as a negative rather than a positive form of openness. This draws on Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty, where the positive form is described as a “freedom to” and the negative form as a “freedom from” in which the “defence of liberty consists in the ‘negative’ goal of warding off interference” (Berlin 1969, 60). In other words, a negative view of liberty, or indeed openness, tends to be concerned with the removal of perceived obstacles or barriers rather than on the characteristics of the resulting condition.
As Knox (2013a) shows, the open education movement has predominantly framed its mission in terms of freedom from, characterizing established educational institutions as rigid, antiquated, inaccessible, and ultimately closed, in opposition to which the open movement is cast as a disruptive liberation. Chief among the common economic arguments for open education has been that demand for higher education exceeds supply (Atkins, Brown, and Hammond 2007; Brown and Adler 2008; Laurillard 2008; Macintosh McGreal, and Taylor 2011; Daniel and Killion 2012), foregrounding geographical distance and financial cost as the principal barriers to openness in the sector. Elsewhere, Atkins et al. (2007) are more explicit about “the removal of ‘unfreedoms’” (2007, 1), suggesting rather precisely the framing of open education in oppositional and negative terms, and largely failing to define any condition of ensuing openness. The assumption underpinning this—problematic in our view—is that if we continue focusing on the dismantling of obstacles, a liberating form of open education cannot fail to emerge.
Such overemphasis on the circumstances through which openness might emerge—that is, the removal of perceived barriers and the creation of backdrops into which projects can be situated—tends to result in two problematic and interrelated assumptions about the “open” of open education: that it is a straightforward, impartial condition and that it will emerge automatically once the right conditions are established. In other words, open education is neutral and natural.
As Caswell et al. (2008) emphasize, the right to education has long been established under article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for which open educational resources constitute the “movement to make this happen” (x). This association serves to naturalize the idea of open education as a core human entitlement; however, it also alludes to the particular kind of individualism that often underpins and inflects much of the discourse in this area. In foregrounding the idea of self-directing learners and diminishing the role of the institution and the professionalism of its teachers (see Knox 2013a, 2013b), open educational initiatives have tended to align themselves with the “learnification” described in part I of this book, which is problematic in the way it reduces the project of education entirely to the notion of learning and the learner (Biesta 2005, 2012).
Key to this shift is the framing of a transactional model for education, in which learners are cast as self-governing consumers of educational services (Biesta 2005). Trends for openness (especially MOOCs) have too often been subsumed into this neoliberal vision for the higher education sector (Hall 2015). Returning to Berlin’s (1969) concept of negative liberty, one can discern the foundations of this political perspective as a curtailing of the centralized state to a role of defending individual freedoms, without which proponents claim “civilization cannot advance; the truth will not, for lack of a free market in ideas, come to light” (Berlin 1969, 60). This maps quite precisely to the position adopted by the open education movement, where the individual right to learn, and to learn more “authentically,” must be served by diminishing institutional apparatus. The kind of institutionalized educational framing that might structure how learning should best come about is seen as an external imposition on the free market tendencies of self-directing and self-knowing learner-citizens. In this sense, we might better understand openness not as a straightforward, impartial, or neutral condition for education, but rather as one that is indicative of a particular political project of education, grounded in the idea of the individual as inherently motivated and independently able to “learn.”
As Berlin (1969) astutely notes, one of the problems with an overemphasis on individual rights is a logical predisposition to overlook questions of power. This is precisely what Berlin means when he suggests of negative freedom that “liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source” (62). The area of control is the human subject (the self), and in the negative position, questions about its liberation far outweigh any interest in where or in what form liberation might be derived. In focusing on the rights and permissions of individuals, the open education movement has tended to devote less attention to the specific conditions of openness or to asking questions about how and from where it is produced and therefore what issues of authority, control, or privilege might be involved. One key example is the high-profile promotion of open educational resources (OER) as the technical solution to the training of a global workforce (Daniel and Killion 2012). Where Daniel and Killion write, “Imagine what our global economy will look like when the estimated 90% or more of earth’s inhabitants currently locked out of high-quality post-secondary education and job training opportunities finally get a fair shot,” the broader political and economic drivers of this brand of open education seem barely disguised. While it may be reasonable to assume a certain level of emancipatory transformation for many of these earthly inhabitants, there is also need to look at the kind of education on offer beyond simply the individual right to access. We need to look toward the underlying source of, and motivations for, this neoliberal vision of openness and question who might ultimately benefit from the resulting proliferation of human capital.
What is perhaps most important about this example is the exclusion of these potential trainees from established forms of education, of which formal teaching is perhaps the most conspicuous. Questions must be asked about the extent to which such ambitious projects infer a two-tier system, where the exclusivity of traditional institutions is maintained and the less fortunate must accept a teacherless model of self-direction. Crucially, however, it is a general sense of exclusion that must be underscored rather than necessarily the specifics of Daniel and Killion’s (2012) OER example. In seeking to foster a seemingly unrestricted time and space for open education to occur, the open education movement tends to portray openness as an absolute, independent condition, in and of itself, that can serve as a normative goal for the project of education (Camilleri, Ehlers, and Pawlowski 2014)—in other words, the notion that educational activities, events, and organizations can be open, wholly, without being anything else.
A more in-depth examination of openness should demonstrate that any notion of open is structurally tied to the notion of closed. As Edwards contends, “Openness is not the opposite of closed-ness, nor is there simply a continuum between the two.” Rather, “All forms of openness entail forms of closed-ness and it is only through certain closings that certain openings become possible and vice versa” (Edwards 2015, 253). Instead of assuming that a natural condition of open learning exists beneath the inaccessible and exclusive infrastructures of university education, to be realized only if we were to dismantle them, the open education movement might rather recognize that openness does not overcome occlusion but rather “reconfigure[s] its possibilities” (Edwards 2015, 255). A key example here is research from early platform MOOCs, which were found to be populated by participants who already had experience of higher education rather than the supposedly marginalized populations claimed in much of the promotional discourse (Fischer 2014). In other words, the kind of openness offered by these platforms worked for particular groups of people and not others; those with access to the required technology, as well as the experience and confidence to learn independently. Despite the claims of a unified movement of openness, open education projects are better understood as a much more complex, multiple, and conflicted arrangement that simultaneously opens certain opportunities for engagement while closing off others. As such, they are inherently political.
Our manifesto point therefore aims to suggest that the open education movement could do more to recognize and engage with these critical perspectives on the notion of open. While Oliver (2015) has specifically suggested the reframing of open education in terms of “positive liberty,” there is also a growing interest in open educational practice, which calls for a shift to the consideration of pedagogical activity and routines rather than resources and materials (see Cronin and MacLaren 2018). Important work here has considered the extent to which open education programs have addressed social justice issues in developing contexts (Hodgkinson-Williams and Trotter 2018), as well as proposed pedagogical design specifically for educational equity, alongside open access (Kalir 2018). A key aspect of this work is the surfacing of marginalized and minority perspectives, too often overlooked in the more mainstream advocacy of open education. As such, these perspectives are more overtly concerned with how a present openness might function through education, as opposed to a focus on the absence of barriers to accessing educational content. Such perspectives do important work in foregrounding the complexity of openness and creating a positive future direction for research that engages the manifesto point extended here: Openness is neither neutral nor natural: it creates and depends on closures.