Open education in higher education: policy recommendations – catherinecronin

"Three months ago, I submitted and openly published my PhD thesis, Openness and praxis. The aim of the study was to understand whether, why, how, and to what extent individual educators used open educational practices (OEP) — with OEP defined as the creation, use and reuse of open educational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies and open sharing of teaching practices. Since completing, I’ve presented and discussed this work with many other open and higher education researchers and practitioners (at OER18, OEGlobal18, NLC2018, and EdTechIE18, and here in the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at my own institution NUI Galway). My work in open education predates my embarking on the PhD, and one key question has motivated me from the start: What values, practices, strategies, and policies within higher education can best support students and staff, our wider (local, national, international) communities, and learning in the context of increasingly open, networked and participatory culture, and increasingly unequal societies. What follows is a slightly edited extract from the conclusion of my thesis — specifically the section on policy recommendations. Please note that the scope of my research study was one higher education institution in Ireland, although the work which I drew from was global in scope...."