To Bee or Not to Bee: Open Educational Resources

David Wiley sure is convincing. He just has a way of making me agree with him, regardless of the consequences. And in this case, one consequence of agreeing with him is a rather unwanted revelation about the nature of education and what it means to me. Why unwanted, you ask? Well, because inherent in the revelation is the realization that I don't really walk the talk on "Openness." As a learner, I don't actively participate in the growing movement towards openness in education. I am still very much a product of a traditional education, having gone four years to a liberal arts school where I 'learned' much of what I 'know' from lecture attendance, vigorous note taking, and filling in the tiny circle next to one of four answers on an exam sheet, number 2 pencils only, please.

What Wiley works toward and believes in are the same thing. I envy him that. I believe in what he's saying, but I don't work towards it, necessarily. Sure, I'm taking the Open Course, and sure, I'm reading along and finding it interesting and admittedly, it does relate to my work as a professional, but it also calls to question much of what I know about being 'educated,' and experiencing 'education.' This is uncomfortable.  Maybe that discomfort is exactly what Wiley seeks to elicit. Maybe he thinks it will take us being uncomfortable with the way things are in order for us to change them.

The change I refer to is this idea that education, as we all know and love it, must evolve to meet the rapidly increasing and dynamic demand of learners worldwide. The internet has the influence to help education evolve, but in very specific ways. And lots of folks in higher ed are resistant to any kind of change - via the internet or any other channel. And without their willingness to shift some of their traditional - and yes, still valid - ideas and norms about education, the system is going nowhere fast.

"Education is inherently an enterprise of sharing" says Wiley, in his speech at TEDx, an independently organized event held in 2010. Furthermore, "without sharing, there is no education," he asserts. He is talking about the benefits of Open Educational Resources (OERs) - both in the context of technology and of sharing. New technology plus demand equals a new era of education. Just how well that era will go is still unclear.

"You can give something away without losing it," he says, to all those nonbelievers out there (there are none in his audience, by the way, but they do exist. And there are lots of them.) "You can't lose your knowledge by sharing it." (Wiley, 2010) He works in this amazing metaphor of the honeybee. He asks us to picture ourselves as honeybees - buzzing around. Our stinger is our knowledge. How realistic is it that metaphor? How is our knowledge anything like a honeybee's sting? Once delivered, gone forever? That might be how it works for the honeybee, but it's not how it works for the human mind and its capacity. You can't just lose your knowledge to someone else by sharing it with them.  In fact, according to Wiley and many other pioneers in the open movement, the more we share with each other, the better educated we become.

Wiley claims that the era of OERs is here, but more importantly, that signals the start of a more defining cultural era, a modern reformation of educational systems worldwide, where a collision between the status quo on how information gets offered, the affordances of new technologies, and an international, savvy learner will create a whole new world for education. Education will be provided to more people, more often, more generously, and faster than ever before.

Working in online education, I can see how technology has already alerted the delivery of education. But Wiley takes it even further. Currently, Learning Management Systems (LMS) like ours are only working against themselves, he says, because they restrict their own capabilities to share information by hiding said information behind passwords, firewalls and credentialing software. "How is that education?" he asks. Or think of the professor who sued his own institution in 2008, claiming his students were violating copyright and unlawfully using his intellectual property for their own gain by taking notes during his classroom lectures. "Why did you become an educator?" Wiley says. This professor was working against himself, as Wiley sees it, and working against his students and their rightful ability to access education and translate it into knowledge.

But this idea that information should be freely available to anyone, anywhere,  is controversial at best, in higher ed today. Faculty want credit for their work. They want to publish - they must publish - and to do that they follow the paths set out before them by administrators and publishers and peers. Their knowledge is their professional currency. Without it, they can't get anywhere or go further in their careers. But again, if they share their knowledge, do they lose it?

No matter how much we all appreciate the power of the internet, and no matter how much we all use it for the myriad of reasons that we do, and no matter how many times we benefit from the information we find there, the internet is still somehow considered a "less-than" medium in the field of higher education. Faculty don't want to publish their research online - they want to publish at Oxford press. They want (and need) the prestige, the honor, and that's how they are rewarded for their efforts.

I still remember working with a student through the CDL Connects program, a few years ago. This program paired up faculty or professionals working at CDL with one or more students who were either on academic probation or were interested in getting guidance from a CDL staff member on any number of issues - where to buy books, who to call about financial aid, etc. This particular student confided to me that she was applying to law school, but she was worried about how it would "look" to the schools she was applying to that she had a diploma from "an online school."

Although I reassured her that since CDL is part of Empire State College and as such part of the State's University system, she would be receiving a diploma from the New York State Department of Education, and nothing on the diploma would reference that she got her diploma "online," I felt weird about how this conversation went. I just wondered why she was going to school here, if she herself had such a low opinion of an online education that she thought she might be overlooked for graduate admission as a result of graduating from CDL. She had acknowledged on several other occasions how rigorous she felt the curriculum was at CDL, and she admitted to struggling through some of her coursework. So if her experience with an online degree had been as challenging and rewarding as she said it had been, why was she questioning the validity of the diploma she would receive at the end of it?

The only thing I can come up with is the same sort of conclusion I come to when I think openness, and open resources and why so few folks in higher ed today see and understand how powerful they are, how influential they are going to be. The world of higher ed isn't ready yet. It might never be ready to appreciate or embrace "openness" in education, just like this student - having experienced first-hand a quality education at an online institution - couldn't appreciate the diploma she would get as a result. In sum, the benefit isn't worth the risk.

Wiley has convinced me that OERs are worthy of our time and attention, and they - combined with a growing demand for less restrictive forms of information sharing and the technology to provide them - could be in a position to change the very nature of educational systems and delivery everywhere. He just hasn't convinced the rest of the world yet.