Page - 12 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

12 M. Weller Access-focusedOOFATmodel—someprovidersareutilisingdigital technologies with the primary intention of increasing access to content or education for specific setsoflearners.AnexampleistheOdishaStateOpenUniversity(OSOU),adistance learning state university located in Sambalpur, Odisha, India. They have a distance education approach, but are particularly exploring the use of other dimensions in terms of improving access. For example, content is free for all but, for certification anominal fee ischargedfromeligible learners, adoptingsomeof theMOOCmodel to increasing access. Faculty and part-time counsellors provide learning support at dedicatedstudycentres.Academiccounsellorsalsoevaluatethelearners.Thesystem isopenandflexibleforlearnerstoself-pacetheirlearningpathintermsofstudytime. OOFAT for multiple projects—lastly, some OOFAT visualisations revealed mul- tiple peaks, which were related to very different initiatives within the institution, suggestingexperimentationwithdifferentdimensionsofhighereducationprovision, before thepossible futuredevelopmentofaunifiedstrategy.Anexample isThomp- son Rivers University (TRU) in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, which has a large online, open education programme. A highly innovative university, it deploys awide rangeof technologiesat small scale.For instance, studentsmaychoose their ownassignmentsorprojects inmanyinstancesandfrequentuseismadeofblogging platformsforassessment.Opentextbooksarean increasingpartofcontentdevelop- ment.Theirdeliveryisoftenavailablewithoutastartdateandrequiresupto30weeks tocomplete. These all represent different flavours of open education, using technology and a mixtureofthethreemainapproachesofMOOCs,openuniversitiesandOERtomeet theneeds of their specific contexts. 1.4 DiscussionandConclusion Open practice has an obvious relationship with higher education. As Wiley and Green (2012) put it, ‘Education is, first and foremost, an enterprise of sharing. In fact, sharing is the sole means by which education is effected’. Openness can then be argued to be central to the process of higher education, but through the practical limitationsof fundingandphysical space, a ‘closed’modelhasdeveloped.Thishas come to be seen as the norm, or a natural state for higher education. The barriers to participation in traditional education are many: cost, time, physical presence, work or family commitments and entry requirements. In addition, cultural factors may conspire to exclude particular groups from participation, including women, certain ethnic groups and students from poorer backgrounds with no family experience of higher education. Openaccess toeducationseeks toexplicitlyaddress thesebarriersandencourage participation in education through a variety of means. The traditional OU approach explicitly targets some of these barriers, as we have seen by the removal of entry requirements,part-timestudyanddistance-basedmodel.OER-basedapproachesare perhapsmore indirect, forexample,opentextbookscanreduce thecostof textbooks