A revolution, or a gradual change?
“Revolution” is a popular word in writing about education technology, and open education is often described that way. The fuller picture is more modest and more interesting: a series of developments in publishing, licensing and technology, each of which made some things cheaper or easier, that together changed how a lot of material is shared. Whether that amounts to a revolution depends on what you count. Below is a brief account of how it grew, followed by a look at the largest claims.
How it grew
The ideas behind open education are older than the internet: public libraries, community education and correspondence courses all aimed to widen access to learning. The modern movement is usually traced to the early 2000s, and several milestones are widely cited.
- 2001: open courseware. A well-known university announced it would publish materials from its courses online for free. This is often seen as an early public signal that an institution could share teaching material openly. Other institutions followed, and a consortium of such projects formed in the mid-2000s.
- 2001 and 2002: open licenses. The Creative Commons organization was founded in 2001 and released its first licenses in 2002. These gave authors a simple, standard way to grant permission for reuse, which made legal sharing practical at scale.
- 2002: the term “open educational resources”. The phrase was adopted at a UNESCO forum that year, giving the field a name and an international policy audience.
- 2007: the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. A group of educators and advocates set out a call for open resources, open technology and open teaching practice.
- 2008 onward: massive open online courses. The term “MOOC” appeared around 2008, and large-scale courses with enormous enrollments drew wide attention in 2011 and 2012. Many of these courses were free to join, but not all were openly licensed for reuse, a distinction people often miss.
- 2010s: open textbooks and funded programs. Governments, foundations and institutions in a number of countries funded the creation of open textbooks and open course materials, partly in response to the textbook costs students face.
- 2019: a UNESCO recommendation. UNESCO’s member states adopted a recommendation on open educational resources, encouraging countries to support their creation and use.
These dates give a rough shape to the story. Details differ between countries, and some developments ran in parallel.
Claims that hold up reasonably well
Open licensing makes legal reuse straightforward. This is nearly a matter of definition, and it is a real change. Before standard open licenses, a teacher wanting to adapt another person’s material often had to seek permission, with uncertain results.
Costs can fall. For students whose courses use open textbooks in place of commercial ones, the saving on required reading can be considerable. The size varies with the subject, the country and what it replaces, and it is not the same as the cost of the whole education.
Access to explanations has widened. Anyone with a connection can now find clear explanations of introductory topics in many subjects, which was not true a generation ago.
New models for sharing among teachers. Collections where teachers publish, adapt and recombine lessons are now common.
Claims that deserve caution
“It will replace schools and universities.” This has been predicted repeatedly and has not happened. Institutions provide things open content does not: structured support, assessment, certification, social contact and, for young people, supervision. Many have adopted open materials rather than disappearing.
“Free courses will give everyone a degree-level education.” Completion rates in large free online courses have generally been reported as low compared with enrollments, and many participants already hold qualifications. Reasons include limited support, competing demands on time and variable motivation. Free access is not the same as finishing.
“Open means better learning.” Evidence that open materials produce better outcomes than conventional ones is mixed; some comparisons find little difference, which for a cheaper option can still be a useful result. Outcomes depend more on teaching, support and the learner’s circumstances than on the license.
“It closes the gap between rich and poor.” Open materials can lower one barrier, cost. But access depends on connectivity, devices, language, time and prior skills, which are unevenly spread. There is a worry that people already advantaged use free resources more effectively, which would widen gaps instead of narrowing them.
“Quality is guaranteed by openness or by the crowd.” Open material varies. Review, maintenance and updating take effort, and not every project has the people to do them.
“Everything is now free.” Producing good material costs money and time. Someone funds it, whether a government, an institution, a donor or volunteers, and the sustainability of that funding is a recurring question in the field.
Where the real change has been
If there is a case for calling it a revolution, it is probably in default expectations. It is now ordinary for a teacher to look for existing open material before writing new, for a student to look for a free explanation, and for a funder to ask whether publicly funded work should be openly licensed. Those are shifts in practice and attitude rather than a sudden overturning of the system.
How to judge future claims
A useful habit is to ask what exactly is being claimed, who benefited, compared with what, and over what period. Be careful with enrollment figures, which count sign-ups rather than learning. And treat reports from the people who run a project with some caution, since they have understandable reasons to emphasize success. Open education has changed more than it has overturned, and that is a respectable result.