Making education more accessible

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I work at The Open University, founded just over 50 years ago, with a mission to make education open to people, places, methods and ideas. This foundation has enabled over two million students to study at a higher level and to receive high-quality degrees online.

Open and accessible education is entirely feasible. By open and accessible, I mean allowing those without formal qualifications to participate. Students can study at the university level without having a typical background. After all, they can rely on their life experience and other skills to bring them up to the level needed for a university degree.

It’s also possible to make education accessible to people with hearing impairments, sight impairments, dyslexia, autism and other abilities and disabilities. These individuals may not be able to attend a regular university or college; however, through a combination of technology and new teaching methods, it is now possible to offer them opportunities to develop their skillset.

Extending education

Another aspect of open and accessible education sees higher learning as a global opportunity. When teaching was confined to a classroom and universities were regional, there was a certain sharing of knowledge amongst academics, but not necessarily amongst students. These days, massive open online courses, MOOCs, extend education to students wherever they are and wherever they have a need.

That’s exciting because it makes education a global possibility while also supporting people with niche interests. Sure enough, if you’ve got a particular skill, there is somebody somewhere with a shared interest. The opportunity to develop skills in small groups with people worldwide is called the long tail of education. In place of massive vocational training, more comprehensive education is possible. As such, people can develop more personal skills, share those skills online, become teachers themselves and pass on those skills throughout a lifetime of learning.

The final aspect of accessible and extended education is the idea of lifelong and life-wide education. Indeed, education shouldn’t be squeezed into just a few years. As the world becomes more complex, we need learners who are both resilient and adaptive. They must develop new skills that they can take forward into a lifetime of learning.

Open education at The Open University

The founders of The Open University looked for new ways to teach science. They knew that students were learning from home because The Open University is a distance education university. Nevertheless, we wanted to give students the experience of being scientists. For example, we sent students lasers. What’s more, we even mailed fish tanks for exploring animal behavior and entire geology kits through the post.

Twenty years ago, however, we realised science was becoming more digital. Digital technology lends itself naturally to supporting student learning. For instance, astronomy can be enabled through remote telescopes. At The Open University, students have access to several telescopes they can control remotely as well as remote labs where they can carry out complex science experiments.

We’ve also realised other innovations to make learning more accessible to our students. For instance, we use virtual microscopes for teaching geology. In so doing, students can access prepared, high-resolution slides of geology samples with which they can interact. They can look at them under regular or polarised light, and interact with them in various manners.

In this way, students work with real data from home. Because everything is online and shared, they have access to more samples than if they were in a lab, including, for example, pieces of moon rock. Overall, students can have experiences through these online and distance learning techniques they wouldn’t be able to if they were in a classroom.

Addressing inequality

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There are huge inequalities still in education, and there’s a need to bring people into education, particularly into higher education in ever-increasing numbers. It’s been suggested that to satisfy the growing demand for higher education, we need to open a new university every two weeks.

Obviously, that’s not possible. We can’t just keep opening new brick and mortar universities and training up the academics. So we need to do higher education and post-school education in new ways like learning online. This has to be accomplished through the technology that the learners already have. For instance, in developing countries, many people now have access to mobile phones with increasingly high-resolution displays and Internet connections. So that’s a starting point whereby we can expand their educational possibilities.

The Open University participated in a Bangladesh project between the government and the BBC to offer English language education. This project relied on mobile phones, a technology available throughout Bangladesh at the time. The project worked with contractors to provide access to pre-recorded language lessons. These lessons cost about a penny, and, sure enough, millions of people accessed them.

Misinformation and a network of trust

There’s another huge problem in education: students are immersed in a sea of information, a lot of which isn’t trustworthy. The question then becomes, how can we help students understand what can be trusted and what can’t? Traditionally, universities were the source of trust in terms of academic qualifications and academic experts. I believe we should work to extend that trust.

Among academics, for example, there is peer support. There are ways in which academics peer review one another’s work. Academics then use this review process to build a network of trust and to be critical of contributions. If we extend that network, we can offer a more democratised approach to the peer-review process.

In so doing, people with expertise can share their knowledge in a way that brings in not just people who have academic qualifications but a broader set of students and learners. As such, we can establish broader networks of trust and support, and we can use techniques such as reputation management to do so. That way, we can recognise people who have the expertise, reward them and share their knowledge with others.

Making assessment more open

Recently, the issue has been raised about how to open assessment. This doesn't imply merely opening teaching and learning, but rather how we can enable assessment to be broader and more effective for citizens, not just for students.

I believe formative assessment and informative assessment may help accomplish this. In this regard, you’re not just assessing the learning that’s occurred with a student, but you’re helping them determine where they are and where they should go. This is quite different from traditional assessment, which doesn’t necessarily help learners know where to go next.

Learning as a social practice

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Perhaps, we can use technology to broaden the practice of formative assessment. For students, this could mean that after they complete a piece of learning, they are shown how much of that learning was effective and where the gaps are in their knowledge.

This type of assessment could then show students what to do next as well as how they can develop further as a citizen. This might involve further contact needed by the learner or a peer support network they should seek.

In many ways, this approach makes a lot of sense. After all, the best universities are not just places where students gain knowledge but also develop a network of support. If you do an MBA course, for example, you not only learn how to be a business administrator, but you build a network of peers that can support you throughout your life.

This sort of assessment would show students the skills they may be lacking and who can help them find those skills. Furthermore, it would help them network in order to develop their potential. In this way, learning will be opened up as a social practice, not just as a practice of receiving content.

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Accessible education

Sharples, M., Adams, A., Ferguson, R., et al. (2014). Innovating Pedagogy 2014: Open University Innovation Report 3. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

Sharples, M., Taylor, J., Vavoula, G. (2006). A Theory of Learning for the Mobile Age. The Sage Handbook of Elearning Research, 221-247.