Open Education DISRUPTIONS Disruptions is a series that interrogates and analyses disruptions within and across such fields and disciplines as culture and society, media and technology, literature and philosophy, aesthetics and politics. Series Editor Paul Bowman, Reader, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, UK Editorial Review Board Benjamin Arditi, Professor of Politics, National University of Mexico, Mexico Rey Chow, Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature, Duke University, USA Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, The New School, New York, USA Catherine Driscoll, Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, The University of Sydney, Australia Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, UK Richard Stamp, Senior Lecturer of English and Cultural Studies, Bath Spa University, UK Jeremy Valentine, Reader in Media, Culture and Politics, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK Bearing Society in Mind: Theories and Politics of the Social Formation, Samuel A. Chambers Open Education: A Study in Disruption, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides and Simon Worthington What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Politics, Matt Tierney (forthcoming) Living Screens: Reading Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television, Monique Rooney (forthcoming) Word: Divine, Dissonant and Digital, Mariam Motamedi Fraser (forthcoming) Martial Arts Studies, Paul Bowman (forthcoming) Open Education A Study in Disruption Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides, and Simon Worthington London • New York Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. 16 Carlisle Street, London, W1D 3BT www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2015 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides and Simon Worthington All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-208-5 PB 978-1-78348-209-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available 978-1-78348-208-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-1-78348-209-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 978-1-78348-210-8 (electronic) ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Preface vii 1. The University in the Twenty-First Century 1 2. A Radically Different Model of Education and the University 21 3. The Educational Context 27 4. Open Education 41 5. Open Education Typologies 49 6. Towards a Philosophy of Open Education 71 7. Diverse ‘Disruption’ 91 Index 105 About the Authors 111 v Preface Many have observed that all around the world, the current protests are driven by debt-ridden students and graduates without a future. The precarious middle class, in short (‘lost a job, found an occupa- tion’). At the same time, the numbers tell us that the worst hit are the working and marginalised classes, mostly across the colour line. The next big movements could easily look quite different. In all like- lihood we are headed towards an even more extensive social crisis. I think in this context and at this moment there is a potential role for what you could call the intelligentsia (or Gramsci’s organic intellectuals) to seize the cultural and technical resources of the university system, while bending both the rules of discourse and the order of bodies, actively looking for different participants and more practical-political ideas. The point is to find a cross-class, multiracial and multigender way of dealing with social complexity—because that has been the great claim of neoliberalism so far, and there’s no way around it, we have to do it better than them. —Brian Holmes1 This book has been written as part of an ongoing collaboration between Mute Publishing and the Media Department at Coventry School of Art and Design. It has emerged from our shared interest in digital culture, theory, politics, and the ability of new forms of networked technologies, open access digital publishing, collabora- tive web tools, and sociable spaces to both help enhance and disrupt educational activity. In the background to this collaboration lies the vii viii Preface research of Coventry University’s Centre for Disruptive Media, with its key theme of Open Media,2 and Mute Publishing’s exploration of the relationships between technology, culture, and society since its found- ing in 1994—expressed in editorial work, via Mute magazine, as well as software and infrastructures development, via the digital services agency OpenMute.3 Our exchange began with an interrogation of the potential role of hybrid publishing tools and techniques in the Media Department’s provision of course materials. In spring 2012 Coventry decided to structure the relationship more actively so as to draw out a stronger strategic direction for the collaboration. It drew up a commission for Mute Publishing to work with the department’s Open Media Group and its Centre for Disruptive Media to produce a multi-part project. This was to consist of: • An open access, collaborative research wiki hosting a contem- porary analysis of the global phenomenon of Open Education (OpenCourseWare, MOOCs, TED, Wikiversity, aaaaarg, et al.). The analysis was intended to situate, contextualise, and orient Coventry University’s own activity in this area and be made available on an open access, ‘liquid’ basis enabling it to be edited, changed, updated, reversioned, and used to produce derivative works. • A book, also engaging with the burgeoning phenomenon of Open Education, co-authored by Coventry’s Open Media Group, the co-directors of Mute Publishing, and their long-time collaborator, the educator and author Ted Byfield. This book, designed as a critical and creative experiment with col- laborative, processual modes of writing, and concise (hence the occa- sional use of bullet points), medium-length forms of shared attention, is one of the outcomes of that more active relationship. Embarking on the initial stages of research for this book, it quickly became clear that the subject of Open Education was not only vast, but also experiencing an explosion of activity and disruptive change that would be difficult to capture in a relatively small-scale project such as ours. We con- cluded that attempts at a comprehensive overview could detract from our main objective of developing a strategic philosophy with regard to Preface ix Open Education. Taking into account the approaches of our respective organisations, we agreed that our guiding priorities and assumptions throughout the book should be as follows: • We use the generic ‘Open Education’ as our central term of ref- erence. This designates an activity and practice, and can on that basis be distinguished from other existing monikers, like ‘Open Educational Resources’ (OER), which we will only use to describe educational materials made available on an open basis. Since, in practice, ‘OER’ tends to be reflective of a distinct history of tech- nical, legal, and/or funding frameworks (some of the most sig- nificant of which will reappear later in this book: for example, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation), it is more geographically and politically determined than we would like our central term to be. Our perspective remains a British one, even if North American frameworks and initiatives dominate debate in the Open Educa- tion field and so inevitably provide our initial guide.4 • We prioritise the activities of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), but, to reflect the dramatically changing landscape of Open Education and define it as broadly as possible, consider these in tandem with grassroots and entrepreneurial initiatives. • Mirroring most Open Education (OE) discourses, we have no typical student or ‘user’ in mind: students can participate in OE within and without conventional HEIs, and, while they are cer- tainly due their own, dedicated critical treatment, we reflect the widespread movement internationally towards models of ‘lifelong learning’ (that is, we assume a modularity for the educational experience, with ad-hoc decisions over progression based on the contingencies of individual lives). • In line with this, we insist on an awareness of the significant role played by so-called piracy, and ‘pirated’ educational materials, and resist condemnation of their use. • We recommend a proactive engagement with technical and legal is- sues, even if these are not always our central focus in this book. • We hold higher education to be a site where the interests of di- verse constituencies come together yet exist in a state of tension and conflict—and are often demonstrably incompatible.