In 2002 Edinburgh International Festival introduced £5 tickets for their late night concert series. This represented a large discount and the aim was to attract new audiences. An audit of the initiative after the event showed no discernible shift in audience demographics. Rather what mostly happened was middle-class audience members who would ordinarily pay £20 to see a concert instead grabbed themselves a bargain.
I was reminded of this when I read Knox, J. (2013). The Limitations of Access Alone: moving towards open processes in education Open Praxis. 5(1) . As Knox points out, widening participation is never just about the cost of entry:
“this paper will question whether free admittance to information is enough to realise the goals of universal education and economic prosperity often promised by the open education movement” (p.22).
This point is also made in Bayne, S., Knox, J., Ross, J. (2015). Open Education: the need for a critical approach. Learning, Media and Technology Special Issue: Critical Approaches to Open Education. 40(3). pp. 247-250.
“Many approaches to open education have been guided by the assumption that students fall into a universal category of rational, self-directing, and highly motivated individuals (p.248).”
And Knox neatly frames these issues by applying Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty in Knox, J. (2013) Five Critiques of the Open Educational Resources Movement. Teaching in Higher Education.
With this in mind, it was interesting to read Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds On Fire: Open Education, the long tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), 16–32. In contrast to the previous three papers here was an optimistic, but uncritical eye directed at the possibilities of ‘open’ education.
Can this be attributed to the fact that the Bayne, Knox and Ross paper was written in 2015 (the two other critiques written in 2013)? Brown & Adler’s paper was written in 2008. Five – seven years may not sound like a long time but those intervening years coincide with the crucial formative years of the MOOC. With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to compare some of Brown & Adler’s assumptions with some statistics gathered in 2015 on MOOCs: who’s benefitting from them and why.
“Approximately 80% [of enrollers] already had at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly 60% were employed full-time, and 60% came from developed countries”.
Obviously, MOOCs are only one example of ‘open’ education. However, the statistics we see in the HBR article serve to support the arguments put forward by Bayne, Knox and Ross. We need to do better than make educational resources available at no monetary cost if we are to achieve more than the equivalent of subsidising middle class classical music concert goers.
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