Are you familiar with open learning as an approach to education? Are open learning and open pedagogy the same thing? What does open pedagogy look like in practice?
Open Learning
In a report prepared by Saide (2000) for the South African Department of Education, the authors dispel certain misconceptions about open learning that have developed over time.
Firstly, open learning is not the same as distance education. The idea of open distance learning creates a false expectation that all distance learning is open. There are many instances of distance learning that do not provide open access or lead to success. In addition, face-to-face learning can be open. Open learning is an approach that has the potential to promote openness within a whole educational system.
Secondly, open learning is relevant to all fields of education, not just adult education.
And finally, open learning goes beyond opening learning through isolated, individual educational projects.
'The principles of open learning provide a set of benchmarks against which all aspects of any educational system (international, national, provincial, or institutional) can be measured. This process can lead to improvements in the underlying design of such system, because it can remove unnecessary closure and consolidate closure where it is important to the efficient and financially viable functioning of the system.' (Saide, 2000)
In this report, Saide (2000) suggests that,
'open learning [is] an approach to education which seeks to remove all unnecessary barriers to learning, while aiming to provide learners with a reasonable chance of success in an education and training system centred on their specific needs and located in multiple arenas of learning.'
Open Pedagogy
There has been much debate about the link between open pedagogy, open educational resources (OER), OER-Enabled Pedagogy (Wiley & Hilton, 2018) and open educational practice (OEP).
In an article published in the International Journal of Open Educational Resources (IJOER), 'Towards a Working Definition of Open Pedagogy,' Witt (2020) proposes a working definition of open pedagogy as 'any pedagogy informed by the practitioners’ conscious identification with the open movement, open access, and open educational resources.' He suggests that OER-enabled pedagogy and open educational practices address the how, [and] open pedagogy addresses the why.
In this spirit we want to share our conception of open pedagogy as part of an open learning approach. We are interested not only in what open pedagogy means, but also in the why and the how. We use a set of open learning principles to help us understand why open pedagogy is necessary, but also what it means in practice.
Open Learning Principles
Over time, Saide (2019) has developed and adapted a set of open learning principles and categorised them as follows:
1. Increasing access for success
- Learners have meaningful and affordable access to opportunities for lifelong learning.
- Unnecessary barriers to access are removed.
- Wherever appropriate, learning provision is flexible, allowing learners to increasingly determine where, when, what and how they learn, as well as the pace at which they will learn.
2. Enabling success
- Providers create the conditions for learner success through learner support, contextually appropriate resources and sound pedagogical practices.
- Learning processes centre on the learners and contexts of learning, build on their experience and encourage active engagement leading to independent and critical thinking.
3. Continuing success
- Prior learning and experience is recognised wherever possible.
- Arrangements for credit transfer and articulation between qualifications facilitate further learning.
The intention is for educational practitioners to apply these principles as part of an ongoing process of evaluation and improvement, to develop meaningful educational opportunities, regardless of the 'mode of delivery' used.
Open pedagogy is not just about open content
Wiley (2013) spoke about open pedagogy as “that set of teaching and learning practices only possible in the context of the free access and 4R permissions characteristic of open educational resources” (Wiley, 2013, final paragraph). Conole (2010) defined open educational practices as “a set of activities and support around the creation, use and re-purposing of Open Educational Resources (OERs)”. So open pedagogy (and open educational practices) assumes access to content and resources in the form of OER.
For us, access can mean many things. Hegarty (2015) associated open pedagogy with attributes such as participatory technologies; people, openness, trust; innovation & creativity; sharing ideas & resources, connected community; learner generated; reflective practice; and peer review. So, we need to think about access to technology, or access to data, for example. Particularly in this time of Covid, when most students are online (if they have access to data and technology) and remote we also think of access to people — each other and their lecturers.
What about access to the learning process? Think about university students you know of who struggle with reading, either because most, if not all, of the reading is in academic English and they do not have the experience of reading those kinds of texts. Or the student who has an educational background that has not prepared them well for post-school study. You may be thinking about a student who has work experience, but not in their direct field of study. For these students, access is about language, level, and what students already know.
In our view, open pedagogy asks the question: how do we provide learning opportunities for students in ways that remove barriers to access, and scaffold and mediate learning in ways that support students to succeed?
Understanding open pedagogy
At the heart of our understanding open pedagogy is understanding how people learn. One of the open learning principles for enabling success is that,
'learning processes centre on the learners and contexts of learning, build on their experience and encourage active engagement leading to independent and critical thinking' (Saide, 2019).'
We have developed a set of requirements for giving practical expression to this principle.
People learn by doing things that lead them to construct their own new knowledge. Reading, creating a mind map, doing an interview, planning a learning session, creating a model, doing an experiment, or teaching a class are all examples of being actively engaged in the learning process. If an action is facilitated or mediated in some way, students begin to understand and reflect on their action, and in that way start to internalise what they have learned.
Telling or transmitting information results in limited learning. For deeper learning to occur, people need to engage in a meaningful activity and then reflect on what they have done to learn something from it. This is an active rather than a passive conception of how we gain new knowledge.
Learning is structured around key activities that build up into identified learning pathways. There are structural links between programmes, modules, units and activities.
An important concept in open pedagogy is the idea of three presences: social presence, teacher presence and cognitive presence.
The most important thing you can do to make online learning accessible, meaningful and successful is to engage students in supportive and collaborative active learning. Create a presence. Create a set of learning activities that engages students in meaningful thought (cognitive presence), discussion with other students (social presence) with you as a critical and compassionate guide (teacher presence). Saide (2020)
Let’s explore the following activity template to unpack open pedagogy a bit more. Scroll down in the block to use the interactive template.
Open pedagogy and open learning principles
Stop and think
Which of the open learning principles are supported by our concept of an open pedagogy?
Our concept of open pedagogy supports student access to active learning, supporting them to reflect, think critically and solve problems. In open pedagogy, the materials “become a mediator” (Moll & Drew 2008), facilitating a conversation between and amongst the students and the teacher and supporting progress through the identified learning pathways. Open pedagogy supports students to succeed and equips them for critical lifelong learning.
Are you open?
Additional Resources
For further ideas about activity based learning, access the following online module: Designing Engaging Learning Activities
Conole, G. (2010). Defining open educational practices (OEP) [Blog post]. http://e4innovation.com/?p=373
Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of open pedagogy: A model for using open educational resources. Educational Technology, 3-13. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/
Laurillard, D. nd. Learning Design
Mhlanga, E. 2009. Enriching online learning experience: the three ‘presences’, Saide.
Moll, I & Drew, S. 2008. Learning, a learning spiral and Materials Design, SAIDE, WIP.
OER Africa. 2020. Online assessment: How do we know if students are learning successfully?
Saide, 2003. What is a Learning-centred Learning Centre? p26.
Saide, 2019. Open learning principles Enabling successful learning
Saide, 2020. Quality Online Teaching and Learning, an online course
Wiley, D. (2013, October 21). What is open pedagogy? Iterating toward openness [Blog post]. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975
Witt, A N. 2020 Towards a Working Definition of Open Pedagogy, IJOER, https://www.ijoer.org/towards-a-working-definition-of-open-pedagogy/