{"id":4344,"date":"2018-01-01T06:00:39","date_gmt":"2018-01-01T11:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.elearninginside.com\/?p=4344"},"modified":"2021-04-22T16:26:15","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T20:26:15","slug":"open-openwashing-half-truths-openness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.elearninginside.com\/open-openwashing-half-truths-openness\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is ‘Open’? Openwashing and the Half-Truths About Openness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Throughout the industry of education technology, sales teams and marketing arms have sought to wow administrators and close deals with a single word: open. According to<\/a> Instructure CEO Josh Coates, \u201cWe own the technology \u2013 but we have open-sourced it. The open source license is out there for the world to audit, use and augment, but the commercial license is what we sell and support.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sakai 11, another LMS popular in K-20 education, maintains a status of \u2018open source,\u2019 as does Dokeos, ILIAS, and countless other learning management systems in both academic and corporate fields.<\/p>\n

In 2015, the Office of Educational Technology within the U.S. Department of Education launched the #GoOpen campaign<\/a> which sought to adopt as much openly licensed education materials as possible in public education.<\/p>\n

The acronym MOOC stands for massive open<\/em> online course. By some definitions, MOOCs are open because they turn away no one. They do not require any kind of admissions process, and for purists, they do not require cost either. This definition fits providers like edX. MOOC-adjacent providers, such as Coursera, Codeacademy and Udacity, certainly won\u2019t turn away any potential learner willing to pay their course fees.<\/p>\n

\"open\"Many online educators, archives, and databases open up their content for the general public to view. Some publishers dream of open access policies and dissolving the practice of commercial licensing from academic material altogether.<\/p>\n

Other educators and EdTech developers believe in concepts of open data, or that data of any kind should be freely available to any and all who wish to put it to use. Former U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra launched data.gov<\/a> in 2009. It currently contains over 200,000 data sets.<\/p>\n

What Is Open?<\/h1>\n

In each of the examples listed above, the term \u2018open\u2019 denotes something slightly different. Very generally, it means \u2018free to use\u2019 in some sense. But specifically, both the degree of freedom and the \u2018it\u2019\u2014what exactly is <\/em>free\u2014vary widely.<\/p>\n

Many\u2014if not most\u2014MOOCs today are not truly MOOCs. The reason? It\u2019s going to cost you money to enroll. Coursera operates on a freemium model. Some providers, like Udacity and Springboard, might offer a hiring guarantee in which you will be offered a refund if you do not find a job in your field of study within a given period of time upon successful completion of the course.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s where much confusion might arise. When it comes to software, many do not consider \u2018open-source\u2019 to mean \u2018free.\u2019<\/p>\n

According to Moodle bloggers<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Having open components is not enough to prove an organization is open. Nor does charging for a product or services immediately make them an openwashing culprit. The criteria is clear:<\/p>\n