After 15 years of digital openness in education with as its most visible elements OER and MOOCs, the open community is challenged to widen adoption of openness in teaching practices to (as Rogers puts it) the early and late majority of teachers. For them to adopt, the gain should be clear and directly visible to have them adopt openness. Arguments like it saves students money, it is efficient because you will not reinvent the wheel or publishing quality OER and MOOCs adds to the reputation of our institution are, how true they might be, not appealing to teachers who are in most cases crowded with their day-to-day teaching tasks. One approach to overcome this hurdle is to connect to the core of a teacher’s job: pedagogy. We assume each teacher has a vision on when his/her course can be called a success and what this means for activities s/he and the students have to perform. Many teachers experience challenges in realizing their optimal lectures. For some of these challenges forms of open online education can be of use, especially in enhancing pedagogical opportunities. The latter is called Open pedagogy. To create awareness of the world of open and the opportunities it may have, we have developed a workshop for teachers and teacher support. This workshop has been delivered several times in Fall 2016. In the presentation we elaborate on the content of this workshop, the experiences we had, the feedback of the participants and the impact it had after taking the workshop. The materials used in this workshop and a script is published under a CC BY license and is available in both Dutch and English. This creates the opportunity to conduct the workshop locally for everyone interested, stimulating/increasing chances for widespread adoption of open education in (formal) education.
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We are now faced with numerous examples of the use of the word ‘open’ in the context of education. There are open schools, open universities, open participatory learning infrastructures (OPLI), open courseware (OCW), massive open online courses (MOOCs), open educational resources (OER), open educational practices (OEP) and so on (see, e.g., Atkins, Brown, & Hammond, 2007; Schuwer, van Genuchten, & Hatton, 2015). What these terms at face value seem to share is their reference to the removal of barriers to the access of education. Open universities have relaxed entrance requirements, open courseware and MOOCs allow for free access to courses, as do open educational resources and open educational practices at the levels of materials and practices, respectively, although the kinds of barriers removed and the extent to which they are removed differ widely (Mulder & Jansen, 2015). However, there is more to openness than this prima facie characterization in terms of the removal of barriers reveals. A brief overview of some existing definitions of openness in education can help to make this evident.
Several trends force Fontys University of Applied Sciences to formulate an open policy regarding MOOCs and other forms of open education. These trends encompass the ambition to offer more tailor-made education and the need to enlarge an international focus. In formulating this policy, Fontys can build on some experiments and experiences from recent initiatives within Fontys.
