OE Global 2019

Session Table Name: TORINO

In this action lab, participants will engage in a proven group process to identify barriers and possible solutions for enabling open courses that link classes in different colleges and universities with each other and with museums, libraries, and galleries across borders and organizational boundaries. The goal is to identify and remove the barriers to creating Open Commons-Oriented Courses.

The web is a two-edged sword for open education. Technology has enabled us to distribute OER’s at scale and produce MOOC’s. While expanding the scale and use of OER across borders and across institutions and organizations, these same technologies have also tended to centralize and concentrate influence in an already powerful center or global north. The emphasis on scale brings an increased commodification of education and an emphasis on content over pedagogy and materials over learning activities. Centralization also brings a deepening of the division between producer/teacher and reader/student. The course is defined by a center of power and distributed to large numbers of participants, at times exacerbating global inequities.

Yet higher education thrives in a commons. It always has. It is better suited to scope and network structures. That is why universities are structured as they are - a polycentric, nested, and connected series of departments or small commons. Commons doesn’t scale easily. A commons functions best in small groups with personal communication.

The same web that has made MOOC’s and mass OER possible has also boosted networking and facilitated small group social interactions at distance. Critical pedagogy and open pedagogies thrive in clusters of small-scale classes. These classes could now span borders and boundaries.

We believe a thriving network of commons-oriented courses that link students from different schools with each other and with other institutions is possible if we collectively identify the barriers and creative solutions.