Keywords

1 Introduction

If it doesn’t open… It’s not your door…—Anonymous

We need to understand openness in education if we want to benefit from the perks it offers in the digital knowledge age, where online networks have emerged as ecologies for many fields, including teaching and learning. Therefore, we must ask the question: What does openness in education mean and how can we define it? This is a critical question that has been asked for centuries. However, there has never been a single answer or formula that could adequately define or explain it, as openness is a liquid term that has been shaped by different local and global needs throughout time. In fact, openness in education is more than a term able to be bounded by a definition; rather, it is an educational philosophy. While its core ideas and principles are universal in their nature, its practice has always emerged in different forms due to the changing nature of educational ecologies. This book chapter positions and discusses openness in education within a broader framework, where teaching and learning are viewed as practices occurring within specific educational ecologies. In this sense, openness in education is explored from the perspectives of an ecosystem and a learning ecology, aiming to explain how these terms relate to each other. Thus, we first explain the concept of openness in education before turning our attention to the idea of ecologies and ecosystems, where we focus on how online networks empower learning ecologies and promote openness.

2 Openness in Education

According to Baker (2017), openness in education refers to “the attitude and culture of freedom, justice, respect, and openness, the absence of barriers, the promotion of sharing, accessibility, transparency, collaboration, agency, self-direction, personalization, and ubiquitous ownership” (p. 131–132). In line with this understanding of openness, Zawacki-Richter et al. (2020) report that the term is associated with critical pedagogy and add that openness is “a colour with many shades, a notion with pluralistic and inclusive connotations, and a stance that defends widening participation” (p. 321). Accordingly, it can be argued that openness in education strives to shape education into its ideal form by advocating a range of values and principles that would lead to equity and social justice in education by positioning human-centred approaches at the core of its practices. Although this effort is already rooted in earlier practices of openness in education, its scope has been strengthened and its target audience has expanded with the advent of online networking technologies.

The openness in education paradigm “emerges from a complex historical background, and its futures are intimately tied not only to open source, open access, and open publishing movements but also to the concept of the open society itself and its [attendant] meanings” (Peters, 2008, p. 10). It is important to understand that the term is inherently broad in its scope, and that the “open aspect of open education refers not only to the dimensions of legal openness (e.g., accessibility and availability) but also to the dimensions of operational openness (e.g., open design frameworks) and of visionary openness (e.g., open policies)” (Stracke, 2019, p. 185). However, the developments in online networked technologies, such as the tools available for searching and accessing information across vast networks (Deimann & Farrow, 2013), the rich interactive communication, and the ability to be socially present, have changed the educational landscape and provided more opportunities, thereby broadening the use of the term ‘open’ as a descriptor (Smith & Seward, 2017) and creating an explosion of interpretations of the term (Pomerantz & Peek, 2016). To better conceptualize openness, Smith and Seward (2017) proposed to understand the concept of openness as a social praxis and suggested three main processes, namely, open production, open distribution, and open consumption.

  • Open production refers to participation being free and voluntary so that anyone can contribute to the production process.

  • Open distribution refers to the free provision of generated content, with no prerequisites or barriers.

  • Open consumption refers to the 5Rs (retaining, reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing) (Wiley, 2014), with the additional practice of ‘creation’ to produce Open Education Resources (OER) from scratch.

While practices related to openness in education have gained a lot of attention from the 2000s onwards, their wider acceptance and the related use of OER and repositories in educational processes are progressing slowly (Otto, 2019). One possible reason behind the slow progress is the confusion between OER as materials and open education as a broad concept for innovative learning designs and processes (Stracke et al., 2019). Other obstacles contributing to the slow progress include issues related to developing a legal understanding and institutional policies, creating sustainable OER projects, ensuring quality assurance, building greater awareness and readiness for adoption, discoverability, and integration, and lastly, copyright and intellectual property issues (Atkins et al., 2007; Henderson & Ostashewski, 2018; Luo et al., 2020). Arguably, one of the main reasons hindering the wider acceptance is the missing link between OER and educational ecosystems (Kerres & Heinen, 2015). The study by Atenas et al. (2019) supports this view, reporting that the development of national and institutional policies that focus on opening up education seems to be lagging behind. Furthermore, while there are policy documents addressing the issue of bringing greater openness to education (Marin et al., 2020), such initiatives are not really reflected in educational ecosystems. Recognizing this problem, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has discussed and approved the first UNESCO Recommendation on OER (UNESCO, 2019), with the hope that this will lead to major changes as the recommendation requires the annual reporting by all 193 UNESCO member states on the status and improvement of OER strategies and implementations (Stracke, 2020).

Open education, as the reflection of openness in the educational landscape, is “a values-based and mission-driven movement” (Biswas-Diener & Jhangiani, 2017, p. 5) and involves the combination and interplay of different dimensions to facilitate open learning processes and generate the transformation of education towards learning ecosystems (Stracke, 2017). In highlighting that the culture of openness and the ecologies of open pedagogy are no ends in themselves, but rather ongoing processes, it has been argued that higher education institutions should empower ecologies and the culture of open pedagogies to facilitate learning as a lifelong activity, taking advantage of digital technologies and digital transformation (Ossiannilsson, 2018). As a transversal enabler of opening up education (Inamorato dos Santos et al., 2016), the digital transformation of education has influenced on-campus and off-campus teaching and learning within the framework of open, online, and distance education (Qayyum & Zawacki-Richter, 2019). Digital transformation has been a catalyst for practices related to initiatives aimed at opening education. Likewise, it has been argued that digitalization can “give a high level of organizational flexibility and a high degree of procedural openness” (Orr et al., 2019). The digitization and digital transformation of education are mostly related to “enhancing and even transforming the learning experience, insofar as they enable open, flexible, disaggregated, and distributed learning, as well as connection and communication” (Xiao, 2019, p. 516). Stressing the importance of digitalization, The Digital Education Action Plan (European Commission, 2020) proposes two priorities, namely, fostering the development of a high-performing digital education ecosystem and enhancing digital skills and competencies for the digital transformation.

The developments in the digitally intense twenty-first century did not only change the nature of knowledge (Bates, 2019), but also the nature of values, environments, demand, and information and communication technologies (ICT) in the field of open, online, and distance education (Qayyum & Zawacki-Richter, 2019). In a broader sense, with the inception of online networked ecosystems (Jackson, 2013), these developments resulted in the emergence of networked individuals (Rainie & Wellman, 2012), networked societies (Castells, 2004), and networked learning (Networked Learning Editorial Collective et al., 2021). All these developments have affected education in many ways, for example, by creating greater accessibility, flexibility, and affordability, features highly associated with the openness philosophy and open learning. However, to better understand the implications of these developments, we need to examine these concepts as change agents that have sent ripplesnot only in a specific field, but throughout the entire educational ecosystem.

Online networking technologies (Brown & Adler, 2008) and globalization (Stracke & Shamarina-Heidenreich, 2015) have deeply affected openness in education, resulting in a capacity increase in its practice and diversity in its realizations. Open online distance learning has emerged in different forms, such as open access, open data, open policies, open licence, open scholarship, and open science, all of which have been fuelled by open educational practices (OEP), massive open online courses (MOOCs), and OER (Knox, 2013; Koseoglu & Bozkurt, 2018; Mulder, 2015). Many higher education institutions have, as a result, implemented open education systems based on models like OEP, MOOCs, and OER. However, it is questionable if these models are implemented as part of the learning ecosystem or as an isolated practice. Although some higher education institutions are motivated to open their practices, it is (more) important how they define, position, and contextualize these practices in their local or global ecosystems on all educational levels, especially on the strategic macro level. We, therefore, need to look at these applications not from a granular perspective but from a broader perspective, such as educational ecosystems and learning ecologies.

3 Ecosystems and Learning Ecologies

Eco etymologically originates from oeco in Latin, which refers to a household, and oikos in old Greek, which refers to a house. To expand our perception of learning rather than confine it to specific onsite practices, we need to support and empower our ecosystems so that learning can be a sustainable, ongoing practice for global development. The idea of ecosystems in education involves seeing our surrounding environment as a home for learning and, thus, the term has strong ties to the philosophy and idea of openness in education.

The terms ecology and ecosystems are used to explain interactions between biotic and abiotic entities and their environments (Jackson, 2013). An ecosystem is “basically an open, complex, adaptive system comprising elements that are dynamic and interdependent” (Brown, 2000, p. 19). An ecosystem view encapsulates the systems and all of its components (Frielick, 2004). Simply put, biotic and abiotic entities and the interactions among them constitute the essence of ecosystems (Pickett & Cadenasso, 2002; van de Heyde, & Siebrits, 2019).

The ecosystem perspective is reflected in the systems view in open online and distance education. Accordingly, there is a set of different systems, where a system can be one subsystem within a larger system. Moore and Kearsley (2012) explain the systems view as follows:

Because distance education requires using a range of technical and human resources, it is always best delivered in a system, and understanding a distance education program is always best when a systems approach is used. A distance education system consists of all the component processes that operate when teaching and learning at a distance occurs. It includes learning, teaching, communication, design, and management (Moore & Kearsley, p. 9).

Human development is one of the central ideas in ecosystem theories. For instance, the ecological systems theory of development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) argues that human development is linked to ecosystems and bases this on a model of five environmental systems that all influence each other. Applied also to technology-driven online learning environments (Johnson & Cooke, 2016), Bronfenbrenner’s theory (1979) focuses on human interaction and actions with numerous environmental factors (Bronfenbrenner, 2005). Accordingly, a microsystem is an immediate environment that refers to groups or institutions like families and schools; a mesosystem encompasses the interactions between microsystems; an exosystem includes formal and informal social settings; a macrosystem pertains to cultural context; and lastly, a chronosystem consists of all environmental changes, such as socioeconomic shifts or historical turning points. Bronfenbrenner (2005) also introduces the concept of ‘bioecology’ in reference to humans’ own biology as a dimension of microecology. From the perspective of learning, bioecology provides a more comprehensive understanding by adding cognitive processes and personal learning differences to socio-environmental factors as variables that affect learning. The significance of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) model lies in its emphasis on socio-environmental developments and the explicit and implicit effects these have on individuals, and thus, learners, from the perspective of education. Moreover, considering that learning is a complex process involving many direct and indirect factors, ecological systems theory provides a comprehensive base by situating humans at the centre of the multi-layered learning ecosystem.

A learning ecology is considered formal when the ecology is determined by the educational institutions or instructors based on learning objectives, and informal when the ecology is determined by groups or individuals based on their own learning needs (Jackson, 2013). From the perspective of formal education, most educational institutions isolate themselves from their ecologies and focus on learning as a cognitive process rather than a social process (Frielick, 2004), which results in learning experiences that are unmeaningful and disconnected from the context of real life. Besides being isolated from the educational ecosystem, it is not uncommon for higher education institutions to schedule learning for certain designated time periods, a limitation that prevents learners from openly and freely accessing learning content whenever they wish or need (Gütl & Chang, 2008). From the perspective of formal education, confining learning content to a scheduled time in a predesignated space hinders the facilitation of lifelong learning for all to a certain degree. As connectedness is a vital characteristic of ecosystems (Pickett & Cadenasso, 2002), online networks with their ability to promote social learning (Brown & Adler, 2008) hold a lot of promise for online learning ecologies. Blaschke et al. (2021) argue that the adoption and implementation of the ecosystem view would serve to facilitate lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep learning, and they define the characteristics of a learning ecology as follows:

  • Learning occurs in the chaos and complexity of a system with multiple layers and multiple communication paths and ways of interacting,

  • The learning landscape is transitional and in an intermediate state,

  • Learning ecologies are constantly evolving and self-organizing, naturally emerging, and distributed as well as complex, highly dynamic, open, self-controlled, and self-maintained,

  • Learners are enabled to take control of their own learning process,

  • Production and consumption patterns of knowledge are defined according to the self needs of an entity or individual,

  • Knowledge is universal, belonging to all shareholders in and out of the ecology,

  • The learning authority is defined by the online ecology itself and, therefore, the learning authority is decentralized,

  • The learning ecology is open and easy to enter and exit and, therefore, supports widening participation, which can lead to further democratization of education, the liberation of knowledge, and creation of equity for those who pursue knowledge (Blaschke et al., 2021, p. 3)

Siemens (2006) highlights the value of learning ecologies in a networked society and the emergence of new learning ecologies involving online spaces where knowledge is distributed across networks. Bozkurt and Hilbelink (2019) further note that “the new [learning] ecology has online and offline dimensions, and the survival and sustainability of this hybrid ecology depend on still learning approaches” (para. 3). Accordingly, online learning ecologies are not isolated from offline/onsite learning ecologies but are rather part of a continuum, highlighting that learning is a seamless, ongoing, lifelong practice. This notion places the responsibility for facilitating the sustainability of lifelong learning processes with the stakeholders.

The synthesis of the literature suggests that online learning ecologies are spaces where learners can socially interact and communicate with biotic and abiotic entities through a symbiotic relationship. For instance, in an offline/onsite learning ecology, our interactions with abiotic entities involve the use of pens, papers, books, multimedia content (text, sound, images, video etc.), hyperlinks, hashtags, and so on. This means that online learning ecologies are an extension of offline/onsite learning ecologies and lead to a capacity increase in teaching and learning experiences by augmenting our learning experiences. In both ecologies, learners have the opportunity to traverse and cross-pollinate these learning ecologies. In online learning ecologies, learners can form digital identities and represent themselves, which is critical in terms of building social presence and fulfilling the socio-cultural aspects of learning. This indicates that while the infrastructures of online learning ecologies are composed of binary codes, they are complementary to and extensions of our organic offline ecologies, like the two halves of a whole. The characteristics of online learning ecologies further imply their power to build learning communities whose members and learning resources can be globally distributed. Learners in these ecologies can collaborate, cooperate, negotiate, create, share, and interact to enhance the meaningfulness of their learning experiences. Furthermore, learning ecologies provide opportunities for educational institutions to operate beyond the classroom walls and disseminate knowledge across these spaces. Likewise, educators can take advantage of these spaces to facilitate meaningful learning by meeting emerging learning needs, acting more like a facilitator than a transmitter of the knowledge.

4 Online Networked Educational Ecosystems and Openness

Learning is the interaction between the knowing (e.g., learners) and known (e.g., learning resources), and the known should be accessible if we want to liberate information, democratize education, and promote lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep learning (Blaschke et al., 2021). Furthermore, the known should be accessible and barrier free so that the ecosystems can sustain themselves. In this regard, openness plays a critical role in online networked educational ecosystems, and online networks have a significant impact for those who want to access educational content (Brown & Adler, 2008). Accessibility is also significant for the collective development as a global society, because data becomes information, information becomes knowledge when contextualized, and knowledge becomes wisdom through understanding and sense making (Cleveland, 1982; Shedroff, 2001).

Siemens (2005) argues that the “ability to foster, nurture, and synthesize the impacts of varying views of information is critical to knowledge economy survival” (p. 7). This can be seen in the growing importance of a knowledge management system in knowledge ecologies (Büyük & Bozkurt, 2017; Peters, 2009; Siemens, 2005), a system that necessitates giving agency to learners so that they can design and manage their learning processes (Blaschke et al., 2021). Therefore, in providing learners with the opportunity to design their personal learning environments (e.g., a combination of tools, services, and resources to design and control one’s own learning process), or personal learning ecologies (Williams et al., 2011), learners are given the agency to survive in their learning ecologies and shape them according to their own learning needs. Another significant element for open online distance education is interaction, which includes learner-learner, learner-instructor, and learner-content interaction (Moore, 1989). In addition to these three types, a fourth type of interaction, learner-interface interaction, was proposed by Hillman et al. (1994). Learner-interface interaction has significance from the perspective of online learning ecologies because our interactions will always require an interface. While all four interaction types are capable of explaining learning, it is important to note that if we want learners to build their personal learning environments, they need to be able to access all the learning content, which includes a vast and increasing amount of knowledge, material, and publications available across online networks. The interaction types and the way they are arranged in our ecosystem viewpoint substantiate the importance of openness and infrastructures, such as repositories where learners can access the OER. Johnson and Cooke (2016) depict the process of learning in an online ecology as follows:

From an ecological perspective, each learner is unique in terms of a wide range of personal, physical, psychological, and cognitive characteristics. The term bioecology is preferred over terms such as the individual because bioecology emphasizes that each learner is a unique combination of genetic predispositions influenced by microsystemic experience over chronosystemic time. Each unique student influences and is influenced by direct and indirect interactions with all environmental systems (i.e., microsystem, interface subsystem, exosystem and macrosystem). All systems and all e-learners change as a function of time (i.e., chronosystem) (Johnson & Cooke, 2016, p. 16).

Ruppert and Duncan (2017) argue that humans are embedded in ecosystems and benefit from these ecosystems in many ways, and that “these benefits enhance the living conditions of humans and are necessary for the sustainable provision of resources” (p. 752). However, these resources required for sustainability are not always accessible, even though each entity “within an ecosystem has its own ecology within the ecosystem, so the whole is made up of many individual ecologies competing for resources and contributing to the system as a whole, so that the whole system is sustained” (Jackson, 2012, p. 10).

5 Conclusion and Implications: Openness as a Stabilizer of Ecosystems

Learning is unbounded and should not be confined by space or time, as this would act as a barrier to learners’ ability to to navigate in learning ecologies and meet their own learning needs. In principle, open learning advocates these features in order to make knowledge accessible and barrier-free for everyone who demands it. Ultimately, the main purposes of these features is to provide an inclusive education as well as to ensure equality and justice. In this context, the idea of openness in education assumes learning to be an ongoing action in line with human development, putting people at the centre of the whole learning process, while the ecosystem view offers a good roadmap for ensuring the sustainability of learning. In an ecosystem, every entity is somehow connected, as is the case in learning. Ideally, learning is a linear, contextual, and situated process characterized by critical reflections, jumps, and disruptions. From this point of view, learning according to ecosystem thinking can strengthen the bonds between formal and informal learning and lead to more meaningful learning. The natures of learning and ecosystems are complex and chaotic, yet complexity and chaos are governed by underlying patterns. Given that, what is the role of openness in education from the perspective of an ecosystem view? The answer is simple; openness provides accessibility, transparency, and democratization, all of which serve to further stabilize ecosystems. To summarize, openness empowers ecosystems, and, in turn, ecosystems amplify openness.

In an ecology, the main cycle is based on producing and consuming. Reproducing and recycling are actions critical to ensuring a sustainable learning ecosystem, and this is where the concept of openness comes in. OEP, for instance, represent the cultures and attitudes, while OER represent green information that can be recycled. In an ecology, metaphorically, a seed sprouts, becomes a sapling, turns into a tree, bears fruit, the fruit is consumed, and the seed of the consumed fruit starts its own cycle. Trees are associated with soil, air, and water, they collectively form forests, and when they are collectively united, they have different purposes. The whole process looks complex and chaotic, but it has its own hidden patterns and, eventually, the complexity and chaos produce order. Similarly, in a learning ecology, green information is the seed that exists within its own process, completes its own cycle, and serves different purposes. The genesis in our case is the seed, as is the information, and, therefore, emphasizing the value of being open in many aspects, OEP and OER have greater purposes as they sustain learning ecologies. All in all, as a basic and raw material that is used by other stakeholders in an ecosystem, sustainability of a learning ecosystem depends on how these stakeholders perceive information. As illustrated in the seed metaphor, there is a cycle in producing and consuming continuum, information turns to knowledge, knowledge leads to wisdom, and wisdom generates new data and information bits for advancement, progress, and sustainability. However, it is vital to note that producing seed, i.e., the information, is significant because such an understanding allows each stakeholder to benefit from it (e.g., consuming information) and to contribute to it (e.g., producing information).

Throughout this chapter, the idea of openness in education is explored through the lenses of ecosystems and ecology. From the implications of this exploration, the chapter suggests the following for future research directions: In the theory, there is a need to better understand openness and how the term is interpreted in different cultures. The results would provide the basis for generating global solutions. In practice, while the value of openness is known, its adaptation is slower than expected, which means that the intrinsic and extrinsic motives governing the pursuit of openness by every stakeholder can and should be examined.