Making education more accessible

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.

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.

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.

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.