Open World Learning

Research, Innovation and the Challenges of High-Quality Education

Bart Rienties, Regine Hampel, Eileen Scanlon, Denise Whitelock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000512236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

This book provides state-of-the-art contemporary research insights into key applications and processes in open world learning. Open world learning seeks to understand access to education, structures, and the presence of dialogue and support systems. It explores how the application of open world and educational technologies can be used to create opportunities for open and high-quality education.

Presenting ground-breaking research from an award winning Leverhulme doctoral training programme, the book provides several integrated and cohesive perspectives of the affordances and limitations of open world learning. The chapters feature a wide range of open world learning topics, ranging from theoretical and methodological discussions to empirical demonstrations of how open world learning can be effectively implemented, evaluated, and used to inform theory and practice. The book brings together a range of innovative uses of technology and practice in open world learning from 387, 134 learners and educators learning and working in 136 unique learning contexts across the globe and considers the enablers and disablers of openness in learning, ethical and privacy implications, and how open world learning can be used to foster inclusive approaches to learning across educational sectors, disciplines and countries.

The book is unique in exploring the complex, contradictory and multi-disciplinary nature of open world learning at an international level and will be of great interest to academics, researchers, professionals, and policy makers in the field of education technology, e-learning and digital education.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Chapter 1 Introduction to open world learning Research, innovation and the challenges of high-quality education

Bart Rienties, Regine Hampel, Eileen Scanlon and Denise Whitelock

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177098-1

1.1 Introduction

The main objective of this book Open World Learning: Research, Innovation and the Challenges of High-Quality Education is to establish an informed theoretical and methodological basis for research and practical application of open world learning. With the global pandemic, nearly every person on this planet has been touched by the impact of COVID-19. In part, the unprecedented spread of COVID-19 has been due to the growth of technology and the interconnected nature of our societies across this planet. Thanks to global travel afforded by technology, a “small” infection in one part of the world rapidly infected millions of people across the globe in less than four months. At the same time, thanks to innovative technology millions of teachers and students were able to continue to learn online when many societies went into lockdown. Similarly, the unprecedented global race to find a vaccine would not have been able to complete successfully so quickly without technology and the combined forces of scientific research.

In these unprecedented and strange times, the power and limitations of technology have become even more visible to many. The rate of transition of learning in the 21st century has undergone both subtle and radical transformation as a result of COVID-19. Some of these changes were already starting to become visible in several parts of societies and educational systems in particular, such as moves towards blended and online education (Hampel, 2019). Other changes like working from home, attending online concerts, or creating Zoom discos have led to substantial organisational and personal changes in our daily lives, which we may not have seen for a decade without COVID-19.

Open world learning gives unprecedented access to information, knowledge, and education and provides support to learners across the globe. However, it is not the technologies themselves that represent the biggest change, but the opportunities for openness that flow from their thoughtful application, in the form of availability of and access to formal and informal learning (Ferguson, Jones, & Scanlon, 2019; Littlejohn & Margaryan, 2014). Without research to inform practice the changes in learning may exclude the very people who most stand to benefit from them. For example, those likely to complete free, online courses tend to be qualified to degree level already (Kizilcec, Saltarelli, Reich, & Cohen, 2017; Rizvi, Rienties, Kizilcec, & Rogaten, 2022). Ironically, the revolution in open world learning is in danger of increasing the digital divide by privileging those with the appropriate digital and learning skills to best take advantage of it (Iwaniec-Thompson, 2022; Nguyen, Rienties, & Richardson, 2020). It is this issue that this edited book on open world learning will address.

The complex (Adams, Fitzgerald, & Priestnall, 2013; Richardson, Mittelmeier, & Rienties, 2020), contradictory (Bayne & Land, 2013; Nguyen, Rienties, & Richardson, 2020; Weller, 2020), and multidisciplinary (Ferguson et al., 2019; Hampel, 2014; Mittelmeier, Rienties, Gunter, & Raghuram, 2020; Scanlon, 2014) nature of open world learning is fundamentally changing society and the foundations of education. This drives an urgent need to review the “enablers” and “disablers” of open world learning for inclusive approaches to learning across educational sectors, disciplines, and countries (Barber, 2021).

The world is becoming a more connected place with the emergence of immediate access systems, such as smartphones and tablets (Kukulska-Hulme et al., 2020; Srisontisuk, 2022), the omnipresence of social media like Facebook (Vogiatzis, Charitonos, Giaxoglou, & Lewis, 2022), Twitter (Bruguera, Guitert, & Romeu, 2019; Rehm, Cornelissen, Notten, Daly, & Supovitz, 2020), WhatsApp (Madge et al., 2019; Vogiatzis et al., 2022), and new methods of working (Bond, Zawacki-Richter, & Nichols, 2019; Bruguera et al., 2019; Kukulska-Hulme et al., 2020; Lucena, Díaz, Reche, & Rodríguez, 2019). This is accompanied by the advent of English as a lingua franca that is helping people to share information and communicate across the globe (Conde Gafaro, 2022; Hampel, 2014; Rets, Stickler, Coughlan, & Astruc, 2022; Rienties, Lewis, O’Dowd, Rets, & Rogaten, 2020; Vogiatzis et al., 2022).

Open world learning seeks to understand access to education, structures, and the presence of dialogue and support systems (Iniesto & Hillaire, 2022; Mittelmeier et al., 2020; Weller, 2020). The challenge of open world learning is to foster inclusion and widen access to information, knowledge, and learning, rather than to allow people, organisations, and governments to increase divisions and build closed groups with privileged access to information and education. One key aspect of open world learning is openness: how approaches to learning can be designed to enable sharing and co-creation of knowledge (Iniesto, McAndrew, Minocha, & Coughlan, 2022; Littlejohn et al., 2019; McAndrew & Scanlon, 2013; Mohamud, Buckler, Pitt, & Twining, 2022; Rizvi et al., 2022). However, these innovations are also changing how societies understand ownership of knowledge, information, expertise, and the process of learning.

Nonetheless, openness also has its disablers (e.g., restrictive quality assurance regimes, required integration across units, accreditation and costs), and the excluding power of “closed” systems (such as classrooms, universities, or corporate training programmes) may seem more persuasive in some situations (Ferguson et al., 2019; Korir, Mittelmeier, & Rienties, 2020). Many open technologies are subject to – and still have in many cases – (over)inflated expectations as change agents (e.g., artificial intelligence-enabled learning, virtual world learning) whilst only providing different practices within the same educational parameters (e.g., in the context of a transmission-based approach to learning) (Bond et al., 2019; Neelen & Kirschner, 2020; Rienties, Køhler Simonsen, & Herodotou, 2020). Some of these “technical disruptions” actually contribute to maintaining restrictive educational norms and practices (Bayne & Land, 2013; Nguyen, Rienties, & Whitelock, 2022). This is, for example, the case with many MOOCs, which, despite their aspirations to fundamentally open up education, are not only based on a transmission-based paradigm but also used mainly by well-educated learners in Western countries (Kizilcec et al., 2017; Rizvi et al., 2022).

Similarly, there are ethical and privacy implications, for example, in learning analytics through increasing levels of monitoring, surveillance, and profiling (boyd & Crawford, 2012; Korir et al., 2020; Korir, Slade, Holmes, & Rienties, 2022), or public concerns whether open education will shift the balance of power of governments, schools, and educational institutions to a global, uncontrolled space. Finally, several groups of users (e.g., teachers, older people, people with particular accessibility needs) seem to struggle to embrace and integrate open technology, leading to resistance and anxieties towards new technologies (Bruguera et al., 2019; Iniesto et al., 2022; Iwaniec-Thompson, 2022; Nguyen, Rienties, & Whitelock, 2020).

1.2 Moving from practice to theory (and back to practice)

At the moment, open world practice is leading theory (Gasevic, Dawson, Rogers, & Gasevic, 2016; Herodotou et al., 2019; Neelen & Kirschner, 2020; Weller, 2020), and research is needed to close this gap and allow experiences from particular contexts to inform generalised approaches with strong conceptual underpinnings. This ground-breaking and world leading book is a result of an award-winning (Open Education Consortium 2016) Leverhulme doctoral training programme that was structured to generate evidence, encourage theory construction, and lead to well-described new knowledge that informs practice across disciplines from 18 PhD students at The Open University, UK (OU). The OU has been on the forefront of continuous innovation in open and distance education for over 50 years (Barber, 2021; Ferguson et al., 2019; Lucena et al., 2019; Weller, 2020).

The main question of this book is as follows: How can open world learning supported by technology help and/or hinder tackling the global challenges that open and high-quality education faces? First, this book provides an integrated and cohesive perspective of the affordances and limitations of open world learning. We strive to build a bridge that connects a range of research communities (e.g., artificial intelligence, computing, educational psychology, HCI, language education, learning analytics, learning sciences, linguistics, Open Educational Resource) that draw theoretically, conceptually, and analytically from each other, but have not always engaged in discussions to learn from each other’s perspectives. Second, this book features a wide range of open world learning topics, ranging from theoretical and methodological discussions to empirical demonstrations of how open world learning may be actually implemented, evaluated, and used to inform theory and practice. Furthermore, this book will provide in-depth analyses of the potential benefits and limitations of open world learning by bringing together insights from 387,134 learners, practitioners, and educators working and learning in 136 unique learning contexts (e.g., online courses, MOOCs, Internet kiosks).

1.3 Rationale and structure of this book

This book will provide state-of-the-art contemporary research insights of key systems, applications, and processes in open world learning. There is a need to raise awareness of academics, researchers, professionals, and policymakers regarding the affordances and limitations of technologies and approaches related to open world learning, and how this influences daily practice around us. This book provides new and substantial findings from 41 leading and promising early-career researchers and academic supervisors from 13 institutions in open world learning (for a full list, see list of contributors). Furthermore, the chapters focus on a range of countries, including Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Uganda, and the UK, while five chapters obtained data and perspectives from across the globe.

Although we have developed thi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction to open world learning: Research, innovation and the challenges of high-quality education
• Chapter 2 Powers and limitations of open world learning: Experiences from the field of education
• Part I Learners and the power of language in an Open World
• Part II Innovative technologies in an Open World
• Part III Educators and inclusive practice in an Open World
• Index