Online open education and social justice: CRADLE Seminar Series

1 April 2019

A large audience was on hand to hear CRADLE PhD candidate Sarah Lambert discuss how contemporary open education – that is, free and online courses – can offer social justice for marginalised cohorts and those typically excluded from higher education. And if you weren’t able to make the seminar on the day, a recording is now available!

Here, Chad Gladovic (PhD researcher into work-integrated assessment) shares his reflections on Sarah’s seminar. A recording of the seminar, along with a link to Sarah’s slides, is also available to view at the bottom of the page.

During her recent seminar, Sarah challenged our understandings of open education. There is a strong indication that the whole notion of open courses, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and open access resources is more problematic than what we initially thought. Even when these concepts are designed to address educational gaps and disadvantages, such aims are not always achieved. For example, MOOCs are positioned as a model for online courses, building from the efficiency of scale to offer free access to learning materials to thousands of learners across the globe at the same time. However, as Laurillard (2016) points out, the learners engaged in MOOCs are often highly qualified professionals and not a global community of vulnerable and disadvantaged learners. Therefore, MOOCs serve their purpose of providing education to the global community, but don’t necessarily reach vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.

Sarah’s presentation centred around searching for the answers on how open education programs can contribute to student equity and the social inclusion of learners. Within our educational practice, we hear a lot about disadvantaged learners and social injustice, but we are not always appropriately trained to identify learners within these categories.

My main takeaway from this seminar is that, as with many complex problems, there is no simple solution to address the problem of disadvantaged learners and social injustice in education. We often tend to adopt simplistic ways of solving very complex and multifaceted problems. For example, there is a misconception that technology will address all issues that disadvantaged learners face, or that providing free learning materials will address social injustice in education.

Sarah presented seven case studies, not only to reinforce the importance of open education but rather to demonstrate how the needs of disadvantaged learners can be met. It is evident that technology plays an important part in increasing the low-cost provisions of education, but technology can help only when there is awareness and willingness from individuals, societies and governments to make changes to address social injustice. The main conclusion, across the seven case studies, is that investment in education has the power to slow the growth in global inequality. Open education provides affordability to disadvantaged learners and online learning has the power to reach geographically dislocated learners.

Sarah presented three main principles of social justice applied to open education, namely:

• Redistributive justice – where free educational resources are provided to learners who otherwise cannot afford them;
• Recognitive justice – based not only on the provision of free educational resources but also the socio-cultural diversity of the curriculum. Disadvantaged and marginalised learners, such as women of First Nation peoples, should have a presence in any particular national or regional learning context; and
• Representational justice – principle of self-determination, where disadvantaged and marginalised groups should present their own stories themselves, rather than told by others.

These principles are yet another indication of how complex and multifaceted issues of open education are, and how support and involvement from all level of our societies are required. The questions and comments from the audience provided an important trajectory for the future development of open education. Some of these included:

• Some MOOCs provide participants with an opportunity to learn but not necessarily with the opportunity to be assessed. Such learners face a challenge to demonstrate and provide evidence of their knowledge. 
• Technology amplifies other critical dimensions of open education, such as learner agency, learner support, learners’ skills and sense of community. For open education, apart from learners, educators and technology, the sense of community is another critical dimension.
• We have a large number of examples of MOOCs and open courses but only a few of those exhibit social justice and inclusion principles in their design. One possibility as to why social justice is not transparent within many MOOCs courses is that there has been insufficient research and empirical analysis to date.

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View slides from Sarah’s seminar here.