Open as in pathway

Open education is a term that has many interpretations. We mapped eight areas in this work, based on citation analysis. A lot of our focus tends to be on the individual module, for example, open pedagogy, open textbooks, OER, MOOCs, all operate at the level of the individual course. Other aspects, such as the Open University’s open entry to degrees, and open access policies operate at the institutional level. We have macro and micro levels of openness, but perhaps an absence of meso- level ones.

I’ve blogged about this before, but one aspect that I think is overlooked is openness at the curriculum level. On the open degree, we allow students to construct their own pathway, choosing from over 250 different modules. Given that the order in which they can be studied can vary also, then the possible permutations for degree pathways is considerable. There is a broad, thin spread of these – very few pathway selections with lots of students, but many with just a handful of students.

What this demonstrates to me is that we can never predict the choices that students want to make, and that are meaningful to them. And nor should we. Yet, we do this almost without question. There are of course good reasons for doing it in named degrees, building on foundations and further specialisation. Even with relatively free choice, there are restrictions – it is not helpful to set students up for failure by letting them take a 3rd level maths course if they haven’t studied any maths previously, say.

Increasingly however, there is a requirement for people with varied skills, and students want to create degrees that are meaningful to them. There is usually a good deal of administration and governance to negotiate if an institution wants to create a new named degree, in say, cryptocurrency. But an open approach to degree construction means such degrees can be constructed almost endlessly within a given qualification architecture. You are simply naming a pathway of existing modules.

For students it means flexibility to go beyond the usual narrow range of free choices, to step outside disciplinary boundaries, to construct degrees that they think will be relevant to their career or interests. They’re often ahead of the game here and can create these quicker than universities can construct formal degree offerings.

The whole degree is the unit that is most widely recognised in society. Although you can list different modules, employers are generally looking at the degree. But it is the area in which we generally offer the least amount of openness. This is partly a logistical function, the tyranny of the timetable means that if you are offering synchronous teaching, you cannot offer courses that rely on people being in two physical places at once. But online and hybrid learning is eroding the edges of this limit.

I think it also arises partly because of a fetishisation around named degrees and specialisms, and also a lack of trust in students to choose wisely. Although I love a named degree and specialisation, they are not the only show in town. And we trust students to take on a lifetime of debt to study, so maybe we should trust them to choose also?

COPIM Conference: Experimental Books – Re-imagining Scholarly Publishing 

Experimental Books – Re-imagining Scholarly Publishing 

Exploring Archival Data Performances, Re-using as Re-writing, and Computational Books 

An Online Conference in Three Parts 

Monday 20 February, Thursday 9 March, & Monday 13 March 2023

Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) 

Experimental Publishing and Reuse Work Package final conference 

Register here (free): https://experimentalbooks.pubpub.org/ (please note that places for the workshops are limited) 

This three-part conference — including talks, roundtables, and workshops — will discuss alternative publishing options for the humanities by showcasing some of the experiments that are currently taking place in the realm of academic book publishing. It aims to inspire authors, publishers, technology developers and others, to (continue to) speculate on new collaborative futures for open humanities research and publication. It also aims to discuss how these book experiments could sit within more standardised or established workflows for print and online book production, dissemination, and preservation. 

The conference will engage with questions including: 

• How will the form of the book need to adapt (or does it need to adapt?) to accommodate the research that humanities scholars will want to do in the future? 
• How can speculating on alternative book futures question the hegemonic fixtures in academic publishing? 

• How can we create new communities around our research by experimenting with the forms and relationalities of our books and publishing? 
• How can we promote the irreducible plurality of research through our academic publishing cultures?

For more information on the conference and the programme please visit the conference website https://experimentalbooks.pubpub.org 

The conference will be organised around three book typologies that we have explored and experimented with over the last 3.5 years in the context of the COPIM  project. These are Data Books, books where a database of resources forms the central element (i.e., not as an enhancement to a text-based book) around which the book is formed; Combinatorial Books, books based on the re-use (for example, through re-writing, adaptation, remix, or forking) of already existing books published under an open license; and Computational Books, books that include or incorporate code as part of their critical content or that execute or run code as part of their knowledge production or publication process.