A number of factors are today making possible that which for decades could only be dreamt of: namely, the widespread provision of free, online, ‘Open Education’ (and Open Educational Resources),   regardless of a student’s geographic location, personal or financial status, or ability to access the conventional institutions of learning — to identify just some of the typical barriers to learning as they are traditionally construed.  The new consensus - at times backed by millions if not billions of state, venture and philanthropic capital - is that this long-cherished, and ostensibly utopian, vision is now finally realizable, thanks to the increasing ubiquity of the Internet and social media. Through the mobile web, self-appointed students across the world can access the kind of high-quality educational materials that were previously only available to a select few, and a diverse infrastructure of elite universities and newly created start-ups is rushing to provide these materials. The global vision is for a wholesale capacity increase in skills and human capital: lifelong learners will chart their own way through their educational experience along what might be described as ‘on demand’ lines determined by need and desire. It is, as one recent video on the subject has it, a ‘Game changer’. And, as its potential participants and beneficiaries, ‘We are all game-changers now’.  

Admittedly, when it comes to OE, the full sound and fury of what, to date, has been a predominantly North American phenomenon has yet to hit the UK. There can be no doubt, however, that the tidal wave of Open Education will arrive soon in the UK in some shape or form. Edinburgh University has recently struck a deal with Coursera (see below) to offer six courses from January 2013, for which at the time of writing 100,000 students had already registered; while in December 2012 a consortium led by the Open University and including St Andrews and Warwick announced plans to launch a new platform of their own called Futurelearn. OE is therefore likely to play a significant part in the turbulent times ahead for British universities, which are already grappling with funding cuts and charging injunctions, financially insecure students, and the emergence of a myriad of new competitors from both inside and outside of academe.

Within this context, it is the way institutions engage with the expansion of Open Education, as well as the manner in which they handle some of the profound contradictions inherent in the Open Education movement, that may present them with not just the greatest opportunities, but also the greatest threats. For our argument here is that, as well as providing an opportunity to experiment, critically, with the institution of the university, Open Education also represents a direct challenge to the university.

If nothing else, in the current climate of ‘austerity’ Open Education can be used as support for disinvestment in ‘bricks and mortar’ in favour of digital initiatives perceived as offering greater openness, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and income generation, together with unparalleled reach. For example, it can be taken as meaning students can live and study at home, an increasing attractive option given the global economic crisis, yet still get a degree from a US or UK university; but also that fewer staff will be needed to teach such students, with some of their functions being outsourced to labour in cheaper parts of the world; and that those faculty who are still needed can do a lot of their work from home, thus saving on building, office space, heating, lighting, electricity and all the other costs involved in running and maintaining a bricks-and-mortar campus. Certainly, it is not hard to envisage OE-supportive government policies, coupled to an increase in digital provision, leading to an educational landscape with fewer HEIs due to the notional reduction of ‘building based’ needs. There is also a potential risk of a national skills level reduction (based on recent trends this is not unlikely). In this scenario, OE is in danger of becoming a skills/numbers/targets generator, much like the UK Apprenticeships scheme: funded to nurture a dramatic, generalised hike in teaching provision, while in reality leaving a human skills capital deficit in its wake. Yet as David Golumbia emphasizes with regard to the situation in the US, there can be detected in OE a still greater, albeit related, threat:

The neoliberal assault on higher education… exists primarily to limit the amount of critical thinking that goes on in the minds of citizens, because democratic thought, with its emphasis on critique, has become a major stumbling block to capital's pure accumulation and acceleration. More accurately: it is one of the only remaining stumbling blocks to capital's accumulation… The instrumentalization and corporatization of the University is one of the primary tactics this assault uses to realize its strategy, and thus analyses that attempt to meet the assault halfway by assessing liberal arts education on the basis of measurable outcomes… can only add fuel to the fire that is meant to burn down the University's most vital function: the maintenance of democracy through the continued study of the many discourses… that have gone into its development.    

Given the above, it is vital for educators to realize that the advent of massive online education environments, including MOOCs, is not being done primarily to ‘democratize’ access to education, but instead as the decisive tactic in the war to analyze forcibly each part of higher education on instrumental and economic terms…. We should not be negotiating with forces whose explicit intent is to destroy the institutions to which we have devoted our lives and careers.  

(David Golumbia, ‘Executives and Corporatization’, posting on the Empyre email list, November 25, 2012)

Open Education’s explicit (and often deliberate) fusion of conservative and progressive tendencies and discourses is undoubtedly an important element of this somewhat contradictory and confusing picture. In this sense, the near-ubiquitous talk of ‘Edu-punks’, ‘DiY Universities’, and the ‘hacking’ of fusty departments can also  appear as little more than a necessary first building block in the construction of new kinds of academies, accreditation systems, syllabi and assessment procedures that are different yet the same. A certain amount of disruption is a necessary part of the process of delivering the new (albeit more instrumentalized, corporatized and less critical) Russell Group and Ivy League, it seems.

Of course, to some extent it is a tension between conservative and progressive tendencies that was always present in the university. But the at least double nature of the situation now appears rather pronounced, contributing to an inescapable sense that all is not what it often seems with Open Education. Viewed in this light, a lack of rigorous critical engagement with OE's core precepts can represent a serious problem. Consequently, in what follows, we argue that one way of responding to the rapidly changing HE environment is by creating spaces for just such a critical engagement, as part of a broader educational strategy for proactive experimentation with new and emerging ‘open’ media, designed to generate possibilities for a radically different model of the university from those with which we are familiar with to date.

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