Page - 5 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

1 Open and FreeAccess toEducation for All 5 • Low completion rate—with around only 10% of registered students completing, completion rates have been problematic for MOOCs (Jordan, 2014). • Learner demographics—most successful MOOC learners were usually already well educated (Christensen et al., 2013), and this finding undermined claims of MOOCs democratising learning. • Sustainability—as the MOOC production model became industrialised they required high-quality media outputs, and so their costs increased considerably, particularlywhenstafftime,marketingandsupportwerefactoredinHollandsand Tirthali(2014).Findingsustainablebusinessmodelsthatjustifiedthisexpenditure has proven problematic. These issuessawachange in tonearoundMOOCs,withMOOCproviderCours- era (2013) announcing that they were going to ‘explore MOOC-based learning on campus’. This resembles conventional blended learning, or e-learning, but with a newplatform.Similarly,GeorgiaTechannouncedtheywereofferingamasters-level MOOC which was not free (costing $7000), once again conflating online learning withMOOCs,andThrun’scompanyUdacity‘pivoted’tofocusoncorporatetraining. Once the initialhyperbolehaddiedaway,morepracticalapplicationsofMOOCs began toemerge.Although thedemographicsandcompletionrates remainan issue, millions of people gained access to education through them, finding this way of learningenjoyableanduseful,often inareas thatareverymeaningful to individual’s lives.Forexample,Farrow,Ward,Klekociuk,&Vickers(2017)reportonover11,000 participantsinaMOOConunderstandingdementia.Therearealsoexamplesoftheir use in formaleducation toexpand thecurriculum, forexample, theDelftUniversity of Technology offers a ‘Virtual Exchange Programme’ whereby its campus based students can take MOOCs with other accredited providers, and receive credit at Delft (Pickard, 2018). It can also be argued that MOOCs raised the profile of open accesstoeducationwithinconventionaluniversities,particularlyinanonlineformat. Even if MOOCs themselves are only open in terms of enrolment, and not in terms of licencing, their presence has created a dialogue around access to education in a digital age. 1.2 MappingOpen Education Thesethreestrandsallhaveincommonamotivationtoincreaseaccess toeducation, often for learners who are otherwise disadvantaged and denied access to traditional highereducation foravarietyof reasons.However, it tends tobe thecase thatprac- titioners in each of these areas sees their view of ‘open education’ as the dominant orevensoleformofopeneducation.Thishas implicationsforhowopenapproaches to education develop, for instance, Wiley (2013), Wiley and Hilton III (2018) who is concerned with the OER movement, defines open pedagogy as the ‘set of teach- ing and learning practices only possible in the context of the affordances of open educational resourcesasenabledby the5Rs’and talksofOERenabledpedagogies.