First published 26 November 2007. Last updated 3 May 2008. 

leo.pollak@gmail.com 

www.opentlc.org 

Open Source and the Benefits of Education 

by Leo Max Pollak 

 

Introduction: the changing basis of benefit distribution 

In a recent Treasury essay on what we can know about the benefits of education, the LSE economist Nicholas Barr emphasised that while the benefits of education extended beyond its primary purpose of ‘[transmitting] knowledge and skills, and attitudes and values’, a ‘definite [economic] measure of the benefits of education is not possible’. A major concern in his essay was what he described as the ‘just apportionment of scarcity’, that is, the equitable provision of scarce educational materials. The essay proceeded to deploy notions of static and dynamic efficiency against which the deployment of educational resources could be measured.[1]  

In this article, I will argue that with the arrival of the so-called “Web 2.0” revolution providing a wide array of digital free-to-use open-source document, audio, video, user-generative and interactive tools, the scarcity assumption on which Barr based his argument is negated, and for those publicly-funded education resources that can be transmitted digitally and without charge in their provision – syllabi, lecture notes, reading lists, links to open-access readings and papers, video and audio lectures, audio-synched slideshows etc [2] – the presumption of scarcity is now a presumption of abundance, altering the calculations in myriad ways. 

The pre-digital state of play today in higher education provision is predominantly one of induced artificial scarcity, in which those who pay tuition fees receive the full benefits of a face-to-face educational experience.[3] However, tuition fees make up only a small fraction of the overhead and running costs in academia, and are designed to reflect the life advantage for university graduates. A similarly small, but increasing amount comes from corporate sources, and the overwhelming majority remains publicly funded, by the taxpayer.[4] Educational resources, so the argument goes, had proprietary value because they were scarce materials with restricted distribution, hence the market for learning materials determining a price.  

Now, in an age when non-face-to-face educational resources can be provided infinitely, digitally and in abundance at negligible cost, the key to a higher-education business model becomes to identify the scarce components and to reinstate the proprietary, positional and symbolic value of these scarce components of educational provision. Alternatively, it is to continue to permit a situation of artificial scarcity and proprietary enclosure on what ideally, and now practically, can be considered a public commons good. I argue that there is no excuse for the continuation of thwarted development and squandered potential, for individuals, for communities, for Britain and beyond, when many of the motors of learning and mobility, mostly funded by the taxpayer, can be made sustainably available without added charge to the citizen.  

I argue that the idea of an elite class of highly skilled graduates unleashing their learning and human capital on a grateful taxpaying under-skilled population of non-graduates has neither traction in evidence nor basis for justification in the present political and technological environment. Political parties, trade unions, employer associations, and teachers at most levels and of most pedagogic persuasions complain incessantly at the over-enrolled systems and procedures of education and certification, increasingly serving young people in the art of taking exams, rather than equipping them with the fundamental technical and cognitive habits that serve well in a technology-rich culture and globally-oriented economy. 

The prongs of possibility in Open Access 

This article will make the case for a two-pronged Open Access policy package that extends the principle of the Open University almost indefinitely, identifying the potential range and depth of the benefits that could follow, first, from open courseware[5], and second, from open access examination sessions at contributing universities.  

The first prong concerns what is know as open courseware, and in this context refers to an instituted centralised hub of British open courseware accessible by anyone at www.ocw.ac.uk. This would include the published undergraduate and graduate course materials from the UK’s main research universities, and from other contributing institutions. They would be made available on open terms, with nothing that infringes the copyright of others, and would be universally accessible via the World Wide Web and freely available. A small number of vanguard teaching and research universities are already publishing extensive swathes of their undergraduate and postgraduate course materials, most notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose pioneering open courseware site, www.ocw.mit.edu, has been established employing just 26 managers, producers and publishers. In the space of four years MIT’s open courseware unit has overseen the publication of complete educational materials for over 1800 of its courses, almost its entire course catalogue, with materials contributed from 90% of its professors. Its projected target is to reach “steady state” by the start of the 2008-9 term, with 200 new and updated courses per year.  

At the start of this month, UC Berkeley became the first American university to start rolling out its graduate and undergraduate lecture courses for free on Youtube. The full lecture courses, available for anyone in the world to see, cover subjects ranging from Bio-engineering to the History of Non-violence, from Integrative Biology to a Physics for Future Presidents course that stresses conceptual understanding and the applications of Physics. On a similar tack, Rice University's Connexions programme, has made open courseware freely available, and is now relaunching its university press as a digital venture exploring new models of peer review scholarship, including the deployment of the various multimedia to craft dynamic scholarly arguments. These few examples merely hint at the possibilities open to a bold and ambitious government concerned with artificial restrictions on individual and communal development, and would animate those prepared to implement, at negligible cost, the policies that follow on from a situation of infinite, digital abundance. 

The second prong of policy is predicated on the wide provision of British open courseware, and concerns a new type of higher education certificate, that of an Open degree. Any British citizen who has followed a course of study on an open courseware site has the right to pay a fee and sit the same examination as do students experiencing the added benefits of face-to-face education.  

The added value of a face-to-face over online education in this context cannot be understated, and the availability of an Open degree should, quite firmly, never be allowed to justify any deviation from or dampening of the present policy of widening face-to-face access to higher and further education. 

The arguments that reflect the advantages that lie in a face-to-face degree over an open degree certificate are many. Face-to-face degrees signify a more reliable guarantee of embedded tacit knowledge, with the student’s fuller embodiment of a multi-stimuli educational and cultural experience.[6] Any hands-on kinesthetic dimension to learning would, of course, not be possible in online education. In addition, enrolled over self learning would ensure a more rounded and organised 'workshop' or 'broadcast' structure to learning which many employers would favour over the autodidact's self-initiative. The experience of university, as a transitional rite of passage into adulthood denotes a social and formative experience that remains an essential labour market advantage of being a student in face-to-face education. Moreover, a face-to-face degree certificate also signifies having weathered the pressures of an intense and prolonged workload, and having performed to medium-term deadlines (as in coursework), and under immediate-term impulsion (as in exams). This is not to mention the added benefit of some universities providing individual tuition and supervision, or the lifechance benefit of social network gains, a later-life extension of the old-boys principle. Such arguments and more, I would claim, constitute a compelling case for an open access degree that merely complements an already successful and expanding provision of face-to-face higher education. 

The effects of these two ideas are, of course, wide-ranging and variable, and are summarised in the Appendix chart. While the increasing ease of achieving permissions and IP-clearance in open courseware provision is making its benefits more apparent world-wide to those outside contributing educational establishments, there are I argue, a number of advantages to be gained within academia from an instituted visibility and from freer and more efficient teaching learning and research cycles, some of which are touched upon below. The benefits of open access exam sessions, in which non-enrolled learning can lead to a certificate are more subtle and complex, and could not be fully realised until such a system is given time to fully embed itself in society at large. While I believe there are a rich and diverse battery of cultural, economic and political benefits to follow on from Open degrees and a more open culture in general in higher education, I will explore the issue of open access research publication in more speculative terms, in full knowledge that a growing lobby towards open standards in knowledge provision and use already exists in Britain and elsewhere. 

The Open Access agenda outlined here would be firmly oriented towards a cradle-to-grave unfastening of the pre-set paths and structures that determine an individual’s social position and role, and the institutional order in which they are embedded. Indeed, it is the presumption of this article that each and every thwarting of human development by the temporal and institutional ordering of the life-course is an unnecessary, if at times well-concealed injustice. In an age of cheap public distribution networks that can carry most types of media content used in non-corporeal education provision, the scope of the injustice and the scale of the opportunity cost must impel immediate tractable government action.  

The active decision that government must make is a judgment of societal and individual value and a judgment of economic opportunity cost: on the cartel-value of proprietary status for educational resources against the broader economic value of open commons status for educational resources. With the long-awaited arrival of free digital distribution networks eliminating most of the costs associated with non-face-to-face aspects of educational provision, the choice before any government with a modicum of confidence is one of universal access or continued proprietary enclosure. 

This article will discuss and project some of the individual and communal benefits and benefit-multipliers, both direct and indirect, to open standards in learning, access and research. It will consider, in turn, the effects of visibility on face-to-face education, and proceed to try and identify some cautions worth heeding in the pursuit of open courseware and open access examinations. It will then proceed to discuss the broad consequence of Open Access on the research field and publishing industry, and project some implications for the life course structure and for life span psychology, before concluding with a reflection on the credential culture more generally. Firstly however, I will outline the policy package in full.           

 

This open courseware and certification policy package would advocate the following: 

 

1. To establish a centralised online hub of diverse British open courseware offerings at www.ocw.ac.uk, presented in easily-readable formats and accessible to teachers, students and citizens alike. 

This site would have a number of purposes, solving a number of intractable problems in higher education today:  

•       To provide an integrated single point of reference for the full range of high-quality guidance and information on effective teaching practice, promoting diverse teaching methods, while sharing best practise and driving up standards (parallel to the . A central open courseware site would also better enable educators, students and recruiters to assess the affect and comparative value of a plurality of instructional programmes in Britain.  
•       The seemingly intractable opposition between academic autonomy and public accountability would be overcome with online 'distance auditing', possible for courses that publish comprehensive and up-to-date course materials. This principle would establish a more efficient mechanism for teaching and (if published openly) research assessment, freeing up time and resources for actual teaching and actual research. 
•       With its onus on encouraging consumption of diverse course materials in different areas of study, such a hub would help guard against restrictive framings of syllabus materials, of limited course prescriptions and research literatures. This would go some way to contributing to a reassessment of research funding metrics away from narrow citation indices and the Victorian disciplinary legacy, and towards a broader and richer battery of research metrics. This could in the long-term help to overcoming some of the limitations of peer review as a critical, competitive exercise, allowing space for stifled intellectual innovations, inside and outside of the academy.  

 

2. To establish the right and subsequent capacity for non-students and non-graduates to take the same exam as do face-to-face students, through the provision of open access exam sessions.  

•       The cost of non-enrolled open exam entrance for would be covered by a premium fee paid by the entrant. This would be low enough so as not to be prohibitive, and yet high enough to discourage abuse of the right, as well as cover the cost of printing, staging and marking the examination. 
•       An ‘Open degree’ course qualification would be granted, designating the specific content of the course papers taken, and would complement - rather than compete with - existing face-to-face course degrees. Guarantees would be in place to ensure open access exam entrants are tested to the same level as with face-to-face students, marked as stringently, and as part of the same invisible entrance system. 
•       Specific courses in which hands-on kinesthetic learning is essential, towards professional licenses (as in most Medical degrees, for example), and which cannot be properly imparted online, would not be included in the system.  

 

3. To pass an Open Access Act through Parliament, establishing a new class of Open degree, achieved solely using open courseware.   

•       An Open courseware/certification enabling act would (following the recommendations of the Gower review on intellectual property) extend copyright exemptions on all taxpayer-funded educational materials. 
•       To minimise interference in academic teaching and research, specialised open courseware publication teams would be put in place at each university to assemble and maintain their open courseware offerings. 
•       To provide server capacity or upgrades in technology infrastructures for managing open courseware content and for hosting its distribution of content on the Web. Such added equipment would constitute video cameras, microphones, scanning equipment and automated content management systems (as per the model being developed at UC Berkeley).  
•       To provide early regulation mechanisms for any subsequent support services – essay feedback, supervision, exam practise, etc - for those using a university's open courseware and pursuing its open degree. 
•       To provide for the functional integration and subsequent adjustment of the various Quango remits – of the Learning and Skills Council, Office for Fair Access, British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, Joint Information Systems Committee and the Quality Assurance Agency. 
•       An explicit guarantee would be given that there be no deviation from or dampening of the current policy to expand access to enrolled, face-to-face university learning. 

 

4. To conduct a high-profile public information campaign, promoting the opportunities afforded open courseware and open access examinations and degrees, targeted at adult learners, excluded minorities and students at pre-university age.  

 

 

 

 

The Current UK offering 

Prominent among the various pressure groups advocating elements of the Open Access agenda outlined above, are the Open Courseware Consortium.  Formed in 2005 to promote the open sharing of course materials, the Open Courseware Consortium have aided the sharing and development of open courseware models and setups between universities in most advanced industrialised countries. Unsurprisingly, the Open University is alone in the United Kingdom in providing some kind of free provision of course materials in its OpenLearn learning space site.[1] Regrettably however, its top-down pedagogic style, and sparsity in material types will not be to everybody’s taste and benefit, and the organisation of these materials and lack of prominence for its collaborative tools are arguably underplayed. Yet its limitations thus far do not end there. The indication from the comments in their fora is that OpenLearn is more a place to dabble in learning, as well as too lightly spread for people seeking citations, exemplars and an overview of the literature in a particular field of inquiry. There are also several requests dotted around the fora asking for the materials of a particular course to be loaded onto OpenLearn, yet the majority of these requests go unanswered, leaving a legitimate demand for learning resources unrealised. A telling example of how not to organise the dynamics of an Open Access agenda can be seen on the OpenLearn Arts & History forum, in which a user in October 2006 asked after the OU’s Classical Studies module to be uploaded. A full 26 comments and eight months later, an OpenLearn administrator finally obliged by placing what was described as a 20-hour intermediate study unit entitled ‘Introducing the Classical World’, wishing the users joy in their learning and asking them to review and rate the unit by posting comments in the forum. While it is likely some students and self-learners would appreciate this move, others may well find the instrumental language, over-coding of structure, and general broadcast posture in the provision of knowledge as a commons right to be stultifying and singular. That the UK’s sole showcase of open courseware from its universities is this, when MIT, Berkeley, ParisTech, Kyoto and Tokyo universities are already providing free course materials of advanced courses at undergraduate and graduate level, should be a matter of great concern for our centre-left/progressive parties, not to mention no little cause for excitement at the opportunity at making up the discrepancy. 

As the technology and management consultants, Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams have recently enthused:  

‘Today an aspiring student in Mumbai who has always dreamed of going to MIT can now access the university’s entire curriculum online without paying a penny in tuition fees. … She can engage with the content and faculty of one of the world’s leading universities, studying everything from aeronautics to zoology. Download the readings and assignments for courses. Share her experiences in one of the community forums. Become part of MIT, participating in lifelong learning for the global knowledge economy.’ [8] 

While OpenLearn plans to overhaul its offering in April of next year, it cannot alone bring about the variety of benefits to the research, teaching, learning and skills culture in Britain. Nor can it conceivably confine such potential benediction and enthusiasm to its own quarters. As I hope to establish in this article, the entirety of British academic life, as well as each progressive entity in society stands to potentially benefit from the Open Access agenda. New spaces for learning and personal advancement will be created, with the pace, structure and resources for high-quality learning made available to all citizens. Such space would have the effect of complementing the routes of institutional attainment currently held exclusively (and not always effectively) by schools, universities and the other arena of enrolled learning. 

The swift incorporation and implementation of the OpenAccess policy programme would incur a number of distinct political advantages too. Britain’s standing as a beacon of intellectual development and cultural collaboration would be affirmed and strengthened, and through our extensive diplomatic networks, the British Council, and Commonwealth links, the exercise of what Joseph Nye describes as ‘soft power’ would be enhanced considerably. On the domestic agenda, Gordon Brown’s growing reputation as a tactical overlord, whose ‘Stalinist … control of information’, guarded in access and tentative in action, would be blown apart. To be seen making the case for Open Access, and resisting the inevitable protests of privileged voices fighting for their exclusivity would re-establish the link to a public not impartial to public services free at point of use, and would become emblematic of the vision of Britain Gordon Brown postponed the election for in order to articulate. Labour as the party of learning, of personal development and social mobility would be reaffirmed, and the essential challenges of a Labour government – of giving every person a chance in life, to acquire new knowledge and skills, and to apply these benefits to their and their community's benefit - would be taken on with a new dimension of vigour.  

 

The Effects of Visibility on face-to-face education 

The acclaimed sociologist of media, John B. Thompson, has explored the notion of visibility in some depth, depicting in detail the historical affect of television and other media on political accountability, quality of governance and political discourse more generally. Thompson premisses much of his argument on the modern transformation of visibility with Foucault's portrait of Bentham's notorious Panopticon prison design, in which space was organised such that prisoners were visible to a invisible central guard, thus effecting a new form of discipline and power upon prisoner behaviour. Thompson has argued that the same has been the case in the age of mass media and liberal democracy, with the citizenry's visibility of their leaders bringing a new dimension of transparency and accountability in government.[9] [10] 

The principle here is a tried and tested one. With lectures shown online there can be little symbolic or professional cover for slovenly teaching standards. Open courseware enforced and instituted at universities would act as the utmost guarantee of high standards in teaching, as a crucial new mechanism of quality control. Best practise would find new relays for flourishing as academics can source a range of tropes suitable to them and their students, rather than teaching with minimal guidance, some new lecturers often uncomfortable with having to grope around in the dark when starting out. To use an anecdotal account, my experience at university was that those academics who had recently received doctorates, were fresh and active in their fields, and were looking to establish themselves in their careers, tended to provide the best organised, clearest and most relevant lectures, to the field, the course and to the wider world. On the other hand, it tended to be the established academics in their field, with an air of enthusiasm weathered by experience, and disrespectful of the intellectual contribution of students, who tended most often to get away with an abuse of their power, in full knowledge that their professional eminence was sufficient to maintain their position. While this was merely the experience of one individual, in a social science course, and students were often split as to the merits of the course organisers, I consider the principle of visibility in this arena to be unobjectionable.  

Visibility would bring an end to dipping standards, and would hence provide students in face-to-face education the full benefit of sharp and effective instruction. It is interesting to note, that in the current open courseware agenda promoted by the Open Courseware consortium, the decision regarding visibility, transparency and accountability, is decentralised to the individual institution, faculty or sometimes the individual academic. The UC Berkeley Youtube page includes only those lecturers whose confidence in their own quality is clear. Yet, a number of students and teachers at Berkeley have alleged that those courses not being uploaded in video lecture series are often those delivered with less authority or interaction with students. Decentralised decision-making in this context will, we can safely predict, present a structural obstacle to the broadest objectives and benefits sought by the open courseware/open access agenda laid out in this article. To 'force' academics to have their offerings made universally available is, of course, politically tricky, quite apart from issues of IP-clearance and the permission of rights-holders, explored later. However, the benefit of a more efficient mechanism of accountability, counter to the form-filling ‘rent-seeking’ culture induced by current assessment practices, would provide another point of persuasion for professional academics.[11] 

Those academics and faculty members who regard their profession as a vocation towards public good will most likely view the prospect of government-funded open courseware with anticipation. However, to those who regard their primary teaching materials as holding a strict proprietary status, the process of persuasion in the viability of open access research models could take time. Of course, within government, a degree of strategic precision would be necessary to make this case. Yet the well-worn and increasingly worn-out habit of prolonged consultation as a form of political accountancy and stakeholder relations is not to be advised, as per my cautions expressed below. Ultimately, politicians and OCW publication teams will need to be prepared for a fight, should the resilience to the argument prove hard to break.  

Where John Thompson described the effects of visibility in the political field - of norms transgressed, followed by disapproval, disclosure and condemnation, of a once predominantly private activity made visible in the public domain - a similar dimension of visibility can now be introduced in the scholarly educational field, at negligible cost. In his book on political scandal, Thompson described the attendant risks that come with visibility, risks linked to what he described as 'mediated visibility', 'a new and distinctive kind of fragility', that is, a lack of control over one's form of visibility, and one's subsequent representation.[12] This is a risk that does not apply to open courseware. The control of content provision and representation of self is firmly in the hands of educators, and the best open courseware has been instituted with this is mind, providing academics with the chance for reputation and trust to be established anew, to a new generation of students and stakeholders, and to a far wider audience. 

Cautions against bureaucracy and the risk of risk analysis 

There exist several bureaucratic temptations and familiar yet heavy-handed formulations of risk that must be avoided in the preparation of this policy. They include: 

Access as a burden. To give appreciation to the view that OpenAccess be a new redistributive burden on full-time fee-paying students. On the contrary, open access will add to the advantage of full-time fee-paying students enjoying the benefits of a face-to-face educational experience. The opportunity for students to review the lectures, to deepen the pedagogic affect of their learning, as well as enabling students to view other related lectures from other classes for the purpose of expansive knowledge will, in the long-term, have the effect of nurturing multi-disciplinary question-directed education (look at Shipmans 2006, p.96) not to mention more propitious conditions for concept-creation. As I will elaborated above, the potential risk of declining class attendance will act as an incentive to lecturers and tutors to enhance the face-to-face interactive learning experience, acting as a boon to informative structured interactive lectures and seminar classes (Mao’s qualities of the teacher). Sufficient and well-moderated threads on each online lecture file can be organised to act as a safe and suitable arena for feedback and debate. Taking the 96% approbation of educators using MIT’s OpenCourseWare as an indicator,[13] OpenAccess would drive forward best-practise and, through a plurality of provision, help to articulate the matching of teaching to learning style for different lecturers and students. 

Simple ideas for simple minds. To caution against the simplicity of the idea and its implementation. To avoid the common policymaker and civil servants’ reflex of issuing a degree of intellectual and procedural complexity to this proposal in a bid to inscribe OpenAccess with the veneer and aura of high-end policy-production. This is neither necessary nor desirable, and it is recommended that the assumption be adopted that the simpler the policy the more falsifiable and transparent its effects. 

The protection of privilege. Advice in putting together this article has suggested that strong resistance from some existing students and graduates is likely. Two main concerns were highlighted, firstly, that existing degrees, apart from their proprietary and positional value, will be devalued as the distinction and exclusivity of the degree is watered down by broader access, the personal cost to credential inflation.[14] This argument also emphasises how the intensity of workload in achieving a degree would be downplayed given a universal signification between open source and face-to-face education for the same accreditation.[15]  As I have argued earlier, making course materials freely available does not undermine the added proprietary, positional or specialist value of the face-to-face benefits of education. Nor would a distinction between a face-to-face and open access degree fail in indicating the type of work involved in an enrolled organised learning environment. 

The second concern is the fear that graduates in so-called 'meta-disciplinary' fields using the breadth of their knowledge and skills could accumulate degrees in different disciplines and sub-fields, thus devaluing the credentials of those who have earnt qualifications in those very sub-fields. The most obvious example of this is with medicine graduates, who could quite easily, with minimal preparation, sit exams in paediatrics, midwifery etc. Or with well-read social scientists sitting exams in psychology and economics papers perhaps. For those academics employing the methods and concepts of several disciplines in their work, this could unfold as a discipline against the light use of findings from well-developed fields of inquiry, and contribute to countering some of the problems of closed peer review, as well as provide a more efficient mechanism of quality control.[16]  However, this is an area in which graduates and established academics accumulating open access degrees has significant draws and drawbacks, and whose consequences are worth exploring further in more depth elsewhere. 

Knock-on effects and demands. To include the expansion of knowledge commons, such as public access libraries as an accompanying necessity in risk analysis; or similarly, the prospect of pressure for free internet access, through public Wifi and Wimax signals. It is notable that despite the UK being the only EU country with a majority corporate provision of Wifi, the provision of free and public broadband Wifi by some councils and boroughs is increasing, and the Fon wireless router network is set to expand following their tie-in with BT. While this could likely constitute a next step in an open access agenda, it is beyond the scope of this article.

Managing Microsoft.  Information technology lobbyists presenting themselves as consultants will continue to caricature the costs and culture of open source software production and downplay the impact of their own user lock-in, license restrictions, patent arbitrage and limited maintenance pool. While the well-documented ‘revolving door’ of Microsoft and Whitehall management keeps revolving, it is interesting to note that the present consultation of the educational computing industry would, given Microsoft’s effective monopoly, treat the corporation as a stakeholder in open courseware and open access. It is not. Indeed, the tip of this iceberg has already surfaced, with the OFT having received a complaint from BECTA accusing Microsoft of hampering competitive practice in its dealings with the educational system, often charging schools for unwanted software and restricting the use of rival applications.[17] While Microsoft and other information technology companies are, to their credit, involved in their own similar projects, the deployment of their technologies in this context would present an unnecessary risk of proprietary enclosure and lock-in, thus making the pursuit of open source and open access technologies imperative. 

Fear on non-existent costs  To not quell any fears of academics, having to draw up new course materials, to re-present such materials suitable for a wider audience. The public users of open courseware should see and hear what face-to-face students do, and nothing more, as if to cater for their inexperience. The outreach is not to a different intellectual level, it is merely making the practice of university teaching universally visible. Where it bewilders, it bewilders, and where educators choose to offer additional material, the costs of first copy will be covered. 

The area in which there is a substantive cost is in setting up and running the ocw infrastructure. Where there is a shortage of cameras and mics in lecture halls and seminar rooms, content management systems and scanning equipment. 

The limits of evidence-based policymaking, or Evidence vs Imagination, or Evidence before Experiment. To “trial” OpenAccess, oriented towards certain user, uptake, throughput and grade-point objectives. OpenAccess is an objective in itself. To trial it as a means towards tested ‘active’ benefits would attenuate, a) its central purpose (of providing access to higher-education learning), b) its essential electoral appeal (of freeing up the channels of knowledge consumption and production, via the provision of a publicly available commons good in education, free at the point of use), and c) its party and activist appeal (to allow open access for the nurture of all the talents, and to further realign education policy with socialist principles), thwarted by narrow metric-measurements, trial-testing, and consultation with multi-national players in closed-source software. Indeed, the usual traps and pitfalls of the consultation process will present a labyrinth of obstacles to the adoption of open courseware at British universities. Yet for the full cultural, economic and political benefits of open courseware and open access qualifications to take effect, government must be prepared to legislate should the resistance prove obstinate. 

Rights-holders rights. Further to the question of legislation, the issue of rights-holders remains. Where open courseware is strongly mooted, there will be those faculty members and academic leaders who, as the OCW consortium’s advice puts it, ‘regard their primary course materials as the ‘crown jewels’ of the instructional program, the essence of what they offer to students, the products that generate tuition revenues and the substance of what they publish in textbooks’.[18] In such a situation, a Government committed to tackling the entrenched privileges that hold people back, to vigorously promoting equality in lifechances, would be forced to mediate between competing corporate and communal interests. On the one hand, that of publicly-funded providers of proprietary education and the publishing houses that distribute such materials and limit access through e-book and article subscriptions. And on the other hand, those employers agitating for any provision of quality education for under-skilled workers. Government can force the issue and take a stance, or abrogate responsibility to a NDIIP, or to an arms-length principle of ‘self-regulation’, in which case faculties can decide for themselves whether to publish their materials for global access or not. 

It is worth noting that in spite of the increasing frequency and profile of conferences, study and advocacy groups on open standards in knowledge provision there remains a legal heuristic which enforces privilege and lock-in, shaping the industrial constraints on online content. As in most discussions of online education, the logic of legal restrictions to high-quality publicly-funded learning materials reigns supreme, and several parallel debates in other fields reflect the natural tension between public remits of universal provision and rights-holders.[19] The following section attempts to explore some of these issues in more detail. 

 

The OpenAccess agenda, and research publishing 

The third focus of ‘open-ness’ regarding universities for this article, in addition to course materials and the certification system, could have been that of research publication, the corporate middle-men involved, and the legitimate concerns of rights-holders. There already exists a burgeoning movement towards ‘open access’ for the publication of scholarly and scientific materials, archives and open databases of findings, with a number of traditionally proprietary paper journals experimenting with open source and open access business models. Indeed, the traditional problem of ‘over-grazing’ in the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ does not exist in a context of potentially infinite digital supply. Some commentators have even felt able to say that the movement towards open access research publication has no need for advocacy or defence, as its triumph is a foregone conclusion.[20] However, the rising significance of this self-aggregating digital commons has been paralleled by an expansion of the rights of intellectual property owners, without comparable implementation of the rights of users. As the Open Society Institute’s policy submission has stated: 

“ [Intellectual property rights] are a powerful means to restrict access, exchange, and creation of knowledge and knowledge-based goods – or conversely, to enable equitable access and ensure continued creativity and innovation. IPRs, most importantly copyright and patents, affect everything from affordable and free communications on the Internet, to the availability and price of textbooks, scientific journals, software and drugs, to patterns of economic growth. A healthy knowledge ecology – one based on a balance between private property rights and the commons – is key to a thriving public sphere, a vibrant education system, the advancement of sciences as well as the development of open society.”[21] 

While the experience of MIT in developing its open courseware offerings has seen this imbalance corrected by the enthusiasm of its faculty leaders towards open courseware, it would be wrong to presume a universal experience elsewhere. Two major obstacles stand in the way of the drive towards open access, namely, the proprietary power of journal publishers and some private academic presses; and the problem of content-producers and rights-holders. However, before addressing these obstacles, it is necessary to scrutinise the underlying terms of reference and logics of action that currently constrain access to teaching and research materials. 

The fashionable terms of debate in evaluating the costs and benefits of proprietary versus open status for publicly-funded education are thrown into sharp relief when considering the perceived success of the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) in Britain.  JISC has, in its provision of ICT (information and communications technology) for learning, teaching and dissemination in higher education and research, sought to maximise the ‘development, uptake and effective use of ICT support … in learning and research’ as a strategic objective. Yet the legal imbalance between the rights of knowledge-producers and those of knowledge users come out clearly in contradictory emphases in their strategic themes. Such strategic imperatives subsequently resort to euphemism as they pursue ‘knowledge transfer’ on the one hand, and on the other, ‘access management’, through its deployment of the Athens authentication and authorisation system.[22] From a meta-strategic perspective, it appears that the identification of a proprietary opportunity for academia and its support industries has engendered this contradiction, and that the broader opportunity cost of restricting open access - to the economy, to the research culture, to individuals - constitutes a strategic oversight in need of long-term redress. While JISC has provided briefing papers on open access research publication, covering a few of the variants in business models and copyright licenses, it hasn't informed the thrust of their main work, and has certainly done little to challenge the underlying terms of reference and logics of provision.[23]  

 

Such insistence on extreme positions in the IP spectrum, from all rights reserved, to none whatsoever, are also born out in the terms of reference brought to bear in many analyses of academic publishing chains and cycles, and of writing systems and text exchange in general. Among the many contributions in this field of study, the various advocates of electric and physical media tend/appear to offer narratives of past text cycles that deliver conclusions suitable to their research, political and reading preferences. Robert Darnton, the great advocate of e-books, decentralised on-demand printing and digitally-mediated research, put forward his schematic of historic communication circuits[24], derived from earlier linear communication models, as well as a 'pyramid model of the electronic book, in which detail and supplementation of materials can be provided on many layers using many media.[25] The aforementioned John Thompson, who was a co-founder of the influential social science and humanities publisher Polity Press, has also offered his own model of a publishing chain and book cycle,[26] which has in turn expressed scepticism towards Darnton's predicted rise of e-books. In his and similar studies, the usual proprietary interferences are cited – incompatible formats, consumer-hostile digital rights management, and the high prices imposed by stock-listed publishers obliged to maximise profit against stakeholder interests – among other explanations.[27] Apart from receiving criticism for underplaying the significance of the Internet in the creation and distribution of text,[28]  Thompson is arguably also guilty of overlooking the technological horizon of budget marketisation of flexible display products, such as those currently being developed at Xerox Parc, or manufactured by British start-up Plastic Logic[29], not to mention recent Sony and Amazon’s e-reader products.   

The significance of such differing analyses is in their justification of disputed discourses in a/ competing visions of a research publication environment torn between parallel trends in print and electronic provision, subscription and open access publication models.[30] Scholarly and scientific research publication has seen the major publishing conglomerates consolidate the industry worldwide, often enforcing their position with ‘Big Deal’ packages that bundle many fringe titles while reducing price competition in a relaxed subscription market. Yet alongside these changes in the past fifteen years, there has been the parallel emergence of large open access online repositories and search engines, as well as individual open access journals such as PLOS Biology, BMC Bioinformatics or Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, each establishing themselves at the top of their respective fields only a few years after launch.[31]  Large publishers' 'Big Deal' packages stifle price competition, squeeze out most smaller publishers, and reinforce their position on libraries whose acquisition options are narrowed and have to seek cuts by cancelling subscriptions elsewhere.  Indeed, some editorial boards of highly-regarded journals have cottoned on to this proprietary lock-in and protested against price gouging by resigning en masse and reforming on open access platforms.[32] 

While under the present logic of government action, this would be a matter for academia and its support industries to solve amongst themselves. Under the influence of OpenAccess policies of open courseware and open routes to certification, it would once again become a matter of parliamentary concern and government intervention,[33] where optimal standards for knowledge access and research outcomes are not met. 

While this article defines its Open Access agenda as primarily concerned with open courseware and open access to the system of examination and certification, the question of how scholarly and scientific research is published by middle men and restricted to users of such knowledge is important. The cultural changes here concern not solely the society-wide benefit of expanded and accelerated research cycles, or even the question of research impact, not to mention the tangible returns on a tax-payer investment. It concerns the idea of an intellectual hierarchy enforced by restricted access to research findings, and the broader consequences of integrating cutting-edge research with open courseware and its subsequent utilisation. 

Under current logics of action and terms of reference, the chances of government organising infrastructural support for economically viable open access models of scholarly publishing whilst taking on those special interests in the publishing industry that operate as rentiers in teaching-learning-research cycles replete with restrictions are low, and would meet with resistance in some departments operating under tight budgets. Yet, of the 10,000 non-open access journals indexed in the Romeo directory of editorial policies, over 90% endorse some form of author self-archiving, with a majority backing the open publication of peer-reviewed post-print drafts.[34] In addition, there exists already a growing literature in comparative citation analysis drawn from a wide variety of disciplines demonstrating that open access articles receive more citations, enable a greater research impact, and more broadly aid greater scientific innovation.[35] Furthermore, open access has played a critical part in the exchange of information within and between research institutes with large, complex fields of inquiry. Such research setups - developing novel forms of quality control, placing accountability over autonomy and organised according to broad questions rather than a pre-existing disciplinary niche ill-fitted to the actuality of the research field – are now increasingly evident in the different emergent forms of interdisciplinarity.[36] While it is, of course, important to distinguish between the issues of rights-holders in open courseware and in open access research publication, the benefits of both online provisions would be mutually reinforcing, with learning research and teaching cycles accelerated within academia and without outside suspicion. 

Many producers of course materials – reading lists, lecture notes, slideshows etc - will rightly feel that the online provision of their materials will breach their rights in respect of compensation for an expanded use of their offerings. While many of the materials they produce would draw heavily from pre-existing exemplars and classification work in their fields ('embedded copyrights'), in which a simple citation will suffice, the potentially infinite consumption of such materials without added benefit could still constitute a kind of encumbrance, not to mention a bemusement should there be a number of pre-existing course materials in publishable digital formats. The erosion of any distance education revenues and the fear of an added drain on faculty time or the interference of open courseware publishers would also be of concern. The communication aspect here of the institution of open courseware is all important.  

As was touched upon in the section on the effects of visibility, the incentives should be clearly emphasised. Quite apart from the potential for a wider audience and all the knock-on incentives that such an audience could incur, open courseware would further elevate the credibility and standing of teaching in higher education, and further bolster their negotiating position at pay rounds. However, there are I believe, a number of subtler and more serious benefits that would come from the cultural shift brought about by widespread open courseware. The OCW consortium has identified some of these benefits already, as making a major contribution to the advancement of institutional mission, and in generating alumni and community pride. While the showcase, recruitment and quality control benefits have been explored earlier, the experience of open courseware projects in Utah, Carnegie Mellon, Notre Dame, and Tufts universities, as well as at John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and at the growing Japanese university network have all pointed to an acceleration of the adoption of digital materials, and the effect of fostering collaboration among faculty members and across disciplinary boundaries. Yet one benefit, regarding a common frustration of academics, concerns the potential impact on the forms of symbolic and intellectual capital in the academic field, of what John Thompson has described as 'the indices of scholarly esteem', of a field ‘governed largely by a symbolic logic of peer review and acclaim’. One widely-noted benefit of open courseware, cited by a number of academics at MIT, is how the new media and extended visibility have changed the basis on which individuals advance their careers within their field. While it has only been live for just four years, the transparency that has come to the decision-making processes in tenure or promotion have been radical, particularly given the growing cultural expectation within MIT towards publishing in open access journals, or open access self-archiving. The contrast with trends in the UK is striking: 

“The growing emphasis on administrative accountability within public institutions has, in some cases, resulted in the increasing formalization of [the] mechanisms of appraisal and review, thus giving greater salience to the indices of scholarly esteem incorporated in them. A striking example of this process is the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain, which established a nationwide mechanism of appraisal and review for the research output of university departments, a mechanism in which the indices of scholarly esteem are explicitly embedded.”[37] 

With the burden of the RAE widely-felt by academics in Britain, moves to improve the efficiency of the accountability process have only arguably resulted in a more careful balance of the various interest groups at play. While establishing an agreed set of metrics in criteria of research quality is akin to seeking a national consensus on what shirt to wear, the effects of visibility in teaching and in research, through open courseware and open access publication would have a number of tangible effects. If the MIT experience can at all be generalised, it would provide new guarantees against secrecy and dissimulation in the rejection of intellectual advance. In short, it will act as a counter-point to much of the departmental politics and intellectual machismo that has been known to obscure and obstruct the development and organisation of pioneering research, from time to time, in its practical and theoretical advance. While it would be hasty to argue that the various threads of open-ness advocated in this article would necessarily purify some of Thompson’s ‘indices of scholarly esteem’, it could well go some way to countering the serious charge against academic disciplines and departments that they operate as intellectual protection rackets.  

Of all the benefits, benefit-chains, benefit-multipliers foreseen in the changes advocated in this article, a number of unique affordances emerge, to critically rethink some fundamental aspects of the opportunity structures and well-trodden life paths in Britain. 

Life course structures and life span psychology 

Imagining what a society might be like, encultured over time with a system of open courseware and open access degrees, is an interesting exercise. Allowing a certain presumptuousness for a moment, and making the large leap of faith that government accepts the OpenAccess proposals and implements them successfully with a largely positive public reaction, we can permit ourselves to see how striking are the broader implications, for mobility, equity, learning and behavioural norms more generally.[38]  

While life-course patterns would be expected to be regulated by internalised norms about age-appropriate behaviour, some age-normative conceptions of cognitive and intellectual development have been naturalised as an objectified institution, unquestionable ways of thinking about human lives. Individual life courses have traditionally been viewed as closely tied to three main factors. Firstly, the life courses of other persons, of parents, partners, children, work colleagues. Secondly, the temporal dynamics of the individual’s member organisations and institutions, that of the educational, household and occupational trajectories, unfolding in the context of biological and psychological maturation and decline. Thirdly, the life course has been studied as being regulated by self-referential processes, what some researchers lovingly describe as 'endogenous causation'. Open Access would enhance state insulation from the unavoidable constraining aspects of life chances tied to other people and to external structures, allowing for self-referential processes of life-long iterative learning, better contained for individual development.  

What is important regarding OpenAccess’ impact on lifespan psychologies is the extent to which the unfolding of capacities and personality – such as cognitive abilities, memory, emotion, perception, information processing, attachment or resilience – are not influenced by an individual’s educational experience. All else, assuming its successful implementation and embedding over time, can be fruitfully thought of as motors of change in an individual’s linguistic, cognitive and practical capacity across the lifetime.  

The concepts of life span psychology here are useful (overlapping significantly in use with the brain, cognitive, developmental and more recently, sleep sciences), emphasising notions of developmental neuronal plasticity, in child and adulthood, as well as the social, cognitive and experiential malleability of people throughout the duration of the life course. All such notions point towards to the potentials of all people, whether thwarted or energised by the received frameworks of structure and change. In recent years, a particularly old and intriguing concept has been reintroduced to these fields of inquiry, that is, the concept of sehnsucht.[39] Sehnsucht is most often loosely translated as life longings and yearnings, and focussed on the realisation of personal utopias, and the individual and communal constructions of emotional and mental representations of personal peaks of life. The concept’s basis - that of the objective and subjective sense of permanent incompleteness in modern life, and of a permanent search for perfection - certainly has a distinctly German quality to it, with its connotations evolved during the Romantic period. Yet the interest of this concept here is to consider its application to a British context, and to a context of successfully instituted open courseware and open certification, as keys to mobility invested with new credibility and support. The link between individual structures of life longing, and the regimes of transition, which habitually whittle down options and probabilities for individuals over a lifetime, become potentially transformed.[40]  

The acclaimed life course sociologist, Karl Ulrich Mayer has commented on comparative work exploring the transition between general education and employment:  

‘In Germany and other countries with an important segment of a dual system of vocational training, this transition involves a highly stratified linkage between school achievement and accessible training positions, a two – sometimes three – step transition between school, training and early career positions and a highly differentiated system of certification. In Britain most young people transit from school to work directly within a very narrow age range and receive most of their training on the job. These two transition regimes require and reward different psychological resources and should have different consequences for psychological disposition and personality.’[41] 

On this basis, Mayer and his colleagues have begun a cross-national comparative and longitudinal study, seeking to systematically explore the institutional contexts that play a determining role in life courses and individual aspirations. Analysing a society with fully embedded Open Access institutions many years down the line, the pre-set routes and paths of human development would appear in flux, with knock-on consequences for differentiated development and social stratification.  

Indeed, a policy of open access to the higher education examination and certification procedures would be intended to loosen the long-term basis of the opportunity structure, extricating individuals from a fastened down system that does not universally enable nor universally constrain. Where the latter is outweighing the former, the former can intervene at any accessible and web-enabled computer terminal. While the hands-on kinesthetic dimension of face-to-face body-to-object interaction will not cease to be a necessity in many vocations and professions, a window into the actuality of these (often cloistered) activities is now available, and to keep it shut would constitute a squandered opportunity to improve institutional and professional credibility and trust. 

The education system, while rightly expanding its scope to widen access and opportunity, to boost skills and mobility for all people, can in some instances over-regulate educational careers by its age-graded and time-scheduled sequence of classes, school types and streams, and its hierarchical time-related sequence of courses and certificates. The prospect of a fifteen year old student, using open courseware over a period of time and subsequently grabbing for herself an open degree as an age-inappropriate behaviour may seem anathema to some campaigners for mobility and equity. Yet balking at a central value of a socially-engineered equality of intellectual development would also constitute a similar sort of injustice. If any young individual's personal longing for development is not being served by their educational, family or extra-curricular experience then that person should have options to fall back on elsewhere. If the possibility were available to individuals to map their own life course, would this possibility be deemed optimal, inevitable, or even desirable?   

The sociological perspective of the life course has always emphasised the life course as the patterned dynamic expression of social structure. What an unavoidable knowledge and access to open courseware and open exams would have on such an expression is difficult to predict. While the underlying distribution of transmissible reproducible skills across the class structure will not necessarily be affected by an instituted OCW offering, many of the closed relays for the transmission of knowledge and disposition can at least be made more open and immediately accessible than at any previous point in history. What such all-pervasive access might amount to in the long term – in terms of the dominant features of habitus, and the reproduction of cultural criteria – is intriguing, and may likely confirm or repudiate the distorted visions and exaggerated cautions put forward by some analysts of online content and culture.[42]  

In small segmented societies, the structure of life courses and the functional division of labour was intimately and immediately tied to ageing as a trajectory of physical ability and changing reproductive roles. In contrast, individuals and families in current societies benefit where nurseries, schools, labour organisations, social security systems and welfare provisions intervene in life processes. For good or for bad, Open Access would be a logical extension to this provision, with the tools of learning and access to the certification system taking on one of the key differentiations in society more directly than ever before – the differentiation between those with certificates, and those without. 

When policy impacts of this significance are pre-determined, the full gamut of reactionary rhetorics are bound to line up in opposition. It is stating the obvious that the Open Access agenda would require what Geoff Mulgan in a recent article termed a strong combination of  rhetorics focussed on ‘justice’ and ‘tractability’, to counteract Albert Hirschmann’s corresponding rhetorics of reaction, of futility of action, and the perverse inevitability of unintended consequences.[43] Over the past thirteen years, when it has come to counteracting a ‘rhetoric of jeopardy’, never, even in the most identity-bending moments of the new Labour project, did the government fear jeopardising the entrenched sense of expectation and privilege of those who could train for and afford proprietary education. Such a sense of expectation, I would predict, would be the key differential in the studies of different sehnsucht across cultures and generations.  It is within the ambition of this article that ministers consider that the possibility of open courseware and open access degrees will extend the fight against entrenched privilege. 

 

Conclusion 

As I hope to have argued, open courseware and open access examinations have a range of benefits and benefit-chains, some evident, some more subtle, with a variety of consequences hidden in cracks as kinks. Yet it should be noted that one predicate of my argument has already been the subject of fierce criticism. Namely, the broad notion of credential crisis, in which an increasing supply of certificates into fields of activity already saturated with them causes their devaluation as keys to mobility; while simultaneously, the ever-increasing appearance and importance of certificates renders those who issue them with an inordinate over-determinate power to mobilise and thwart the recipient, placing undue weight on the credibility of the logics, systems and institutions that dispense them.  The argument in the educational field proceeds as follows: that of the central problem of certificates, that grade classifications provide one sole axis of intelligence and ability, and can hence both over and under-signify an individual’s designated value in different fields of activity, rendering the certificate an object of honour that designates as much as it conceals to its executor host and bearer in its role as a permit of vocation. It is arguable nowadays that we are in thrall to its effect, as a quiet totemic force, that bridles all kinds of normative medical intellectual and monetary licenses/freedoms to act. 

However, the above analysis should not be a cause for despair or indifference. The basics of learning, development, community, innovation and fairness are all at stake, and the steady manifestation of the Internet’s empancipatory potential affords politicians and policymakers the chance to think anew, in irreligious terms, the function and meaning of, as well as access to, certificates. The Schools minister has started the ball rolling, with new Diploma qualifications that might eventually remove the status discrepancy between academic and vocational learning. Ed Balls was correct to state very clearly that the government will not pre-ordain the outcome of the new qualifications, their uptake as well as their personal and positional value in the workforce. I too would hope that the outcome of an Open Access policy for higher education would not be preordained, but given a fair chance through an intense, pervasive and targeted public information campaign.  

The new distinctions afforded between conventional face-to-face and open degrees could help enable the certificate overcome its endemic limitations in terms of the signification of information regarding its owner. Under a system in which open courseware and open degrees are familiar parts of the educational landscape, more could be communicated regarding the course of study - the type of learning, the type of broader cultural experience of education, as well as the type of initiative on the part of the certificates owner, not to mention the ability to see precisely what kind of education it was that the degree-holder received. Such a cultural shift could inject new life into the exam and educational system more broadly, enabling new ways of thinking regarding individual and communal development, with refinements and applications far beyond the limited scope of British higher and further education as in this article. 

Indeed, at no point in government and policymaker debates and calculations on opening access – first, in setting the 50% 18 year-olds in H.E. target, and second, in trying to achieve it – did anyone question the value of the certificate, or its actual signification according to actual economic and social conditions. Without harking back to the disabling professions arguments of the 1970s, of Ivan Illich and his followers, the steady rise of open sourcing in education, work infrastructure, in labour markets, and social interaction more broadly, is a tide whose surge is widely predicted to alter the occupational landscape for future generations.[44] Further, the certificate as a pivot-point of aspiration, a signifier for a certain kind of knowledge, capability and disposition will gain a new credibility. This, as an extension and afterthought to my main argument, is a call for fundamental reflection and debate. With the wider availability of diplomas at 6^th form level, and moves to close the discrepancy between vocational and academic qualifications afoot, the time is ripe for a detailed genealogical analysis of certification, and a critical interrogation of its broadest effects. 

For now, however, I should hope for a more modest, if radically different agenda: that of open access to high-quality, low-cost educational course materials; and open access exam sessions in which a point can be proven, hopefully the first of many.  

 

Postscript: MIT released their pilot version of Open courseware in late 2002, placing online 50 courses, with Spanish and Portuguese translations added shortly after. Only a few months earlier, in January of that year, the great author of Labour’s 1945 election manifesto, founder of the Open University, and satirist of meritocracy died. What Michael Young would have said to present-day Labour ministers, regarding the pioneers in Massachusetts and the new dimensions they were exploring to open education is perhaps worth an indulgent speculation. What Harold Wilson would have urged, regarding the OU as his greatest achievement as Prime Minister, and when seeing the chance for the OU principle to be extended, almost indefinitely, is also too worth a celebratory surmise. The traditions of the labour movement, and its party, through thick and thin, I believe point firmly in the direction of the policies outlined above. Where Harold Wilson, Jennie Lee and Michael Young were prepared to take on those who dismissed open education as a ‘blithering nonsense’, so the current Labour leaders will encounter similar tenors of opposition. A radical open admissions policy saw 25,000 students in its first year, when the total student population was 130,000. Now the higher-education population in the UK stands at 956,000, and as Ed Balls has cautioned, such developments should not be pre-ordained. With the CBI in fits over Britain’s skills-gap, and all parties fighting to demonstrate a concrete commitment to equal opportunities, the plain fact now remains that publicly-funded educational resources can be made infinitely, digitally abundant, at a cost close to zero. Unlike in the 1960s, there exists a consciousness about the ready circulation of certificates and the question of what they signify, as well as a resurgent interest in new public commons; also different to the 1960s is the full impact of open source solutions in the electric media. While then it was necessary to prepare the ground for such radicalism with commissions such as the Robbins Report, with civil servants embarking on endless filibustering, now, best practise can be copied and expanded at the click of a button. What the Open University went on to inspire across the world, can happen again on a scale of improportionate magnitude.  

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1. Summary comparison of face-to-face versus online benefits of education, following implementation of an Open Courseware/Open Access policy.  

consider as Appendix, and complete anon! 

Broader economic, cultural and research impacts	Under the predominantly face-to-face university status quo	Under an instituted open courseware/open access university system
On limits to the provision of ‘higher’ and ‘intermediary’ skills	Provision expanding but still structurally limited by restricted access to educational materials, and subsequent broken relay of knowledge and of linguistic and cognitive variety.   Cloister learning providing limited transparency as to teaching standards, with a growing audit culture threatening a ‘battery farming of the mind’[45] in university education.	Global provision of high-quality educational materials, limited only by restrictions on computer use, as well as the range of and locks on Wifi and Wimax signals.  The best-practise upward drive brought about by visibility of face-to-face education, coupled with more efficient mechanisms of knowledge exchange and accountability through open access will help advance communication, analytic and technical skills across the board.
On the knowledge-base of economic innovation	Knowledge still predominantly produced in cloistered academic and private R&D contexts, with a rapidly growing sector of open source problem-solving (e.g. the InnoCentive network), and secrecy in patent-acquisition processes for commodifiable knowledge.[46] [47]	A wide and varied offering of often locally-relevant open courseware, with the open reuse, adaptation and translation of non-patented ideas, and takeup of applications in a wider variety of social contexts.
Quality of common knowledge	Remains limited to primary, secondary and further teaching and workplace training, plus mass media.	On the assumption uptake is sufficiently encouraged, the broad quality of common knowledge should improve.
On international relations	Some universities setting up campuses in countries with expanding economies and tertiary education sectors.  Teaching and cultural exchange networks organised through a multitude of organisations, most notably the British Council.  An ongoing perception of Britain as attached to its colonial past, as evidenced with the well-earnt cynicism that accompanied the latest Gulf War.	An opportunity for Britain to make young people worldwide aware of a major cultural offering, with OCW used in suitable development contexts.  Options available to foreign and international development secretaries to promote awareness and use of British open courseware and thus encourage similar ventures in other countries, particularly in the context of the One Laptop Per Child project.  A further showcase to foreign students of British university experience.
Family habitus/developmental systems  Parental involvement/ habitus influence.[48]	The primary determining factor in educational attainment, in the accumulation of cultural and economic remaining in family and social background.  Assuming constant internet and computer access, increasing means of accumulating knowledge and building skills, in addition to the effects of schooling and other public provisions.	Assuming constant internet and computer use, any hypothetical constraint of parental and immediate social influence can be partially circumvented. Despite inbuilt limits to the online reconfiguration of the offline world, many restricted circuits and networks of knowledge and development can be bypassed through online gateways of access.
On second chances, and the long-term basis of the opportunity structure.	Extensive circumscribed structures provided for climbing the educational ladder, acquiring qualifications, and boosting skills.	Complementing existing re-skilling, job-seeker and mature learning programmes, an institution for circumventing status and learning hierarchies enables the possibility of private learning and its formal recognition.
On lifecourse structures, and lifecourse psychology	Currently ordered along lines of age-appropriate development, class and peer expectation, and a hierarchical ladder of educational attainment.	New dimensions of quality control and access to high-quality learning and certificates allowing for potential any-time any-place learning and attainment.
On academic institutions and departments	Opportunities for secrecy and dissimulation in recruitment and promotion.  Proprietary and restricted journal publication obscuring and obstructing assessment of research impact.  Ongoing notions of a gilded ‘ivory tower’, along with continued vilification of ‘mickey mouse’ courses.[49]  Artificially restricted pool of research contributions and research fields.	Visibility enhancing transparency in internal tenure and promotion.  Standard practice of open access research publication creating a level playing-field for assessing research impact.  Trust and credibility of institutional power enhanced considerably.  Wider range of contributions and applications of knowledge offerings.
Mode of transmission/ benefits of education	Face-to-face students	Online/open access students
Modalities of learning	Kinesthetic (hands-on work, engaging in practical activities), Highly interactive, with responsive instruction, Visual, Auditory, and Text-based.	Visual, Auditory, and Text-based. Potential for on-demand interactive instructional services (essay marking, VoIP supervision etc) to grow as support, with pre-emptive regulation for quality control, to avoid many of the problems associated with the essay-writing industry.
Benefits of open courseware	Positional proprietary and symbolic advantage reduced slightly. Ability to more easily plan their studies, and review lectures, as well as to learn around the delineated area of the course through the provision of supplementary study materials.  Visibility of face-to-face instruction driving forward best practise and enhancing quality control.	Unlike distant learning, there does not necessitate a credential as an objective of the interaction between faculty and student, allowing for learning free of the pressures of an upcoming test.  Departments offering courseware online often find innovative applications of their offerings from unusual sources.  A large group of UK universities simultaneously adopting OCW will accelerate the sharing of best practises in open educational publishing worldwide.
Of Open Access examinations and degrees	Added competition and incentive to more fully appreciative of the wider university experience.	Access to an artificially restricted system of learning tools and certification.

 

 

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