Year: 2024
Type: editorial
Abstract: Context With the firm articulation by the first chancellor of the OU Lord Geoffrey Crowther, at the UKOU's inaugural ceremony, that the open university is "open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas" (Crowther, 1969, pp.1-2; also reiterated by Perry, 1976), open education has evolved over the past decades and has come a long way to be understood and practised as open access, open learning, open educational resources, open sharing, open pedagogy, and open educational practices, among others.In its evolution, technology has played a significant role.In a review of open, distance and digital education in the Global South, Mays (2023) notes that open, distance and blended approaches in open schooling and higher educational institutions have increasingly embraced digital, cloud-based and connected approaches appropriate to diverse levels, disciplines and contexts, and, therefore, contextual understanding is crucial in any TEL design and application.Conole's (2013) research review on pedagogical patterns and open educational resources, and learning design for an open world; and Selwyn et al's (2020) caution about digital inclusion/exclusion, artificial intelligence/datafication, human learning/machine learning, and community approaches to design and implementation, will be of critical importance to TEL designers for open education.Our opening first paper in this issue of the Journal is an interesting and reflective discourse on open education and generative AI.For effective implementation of TEL, Panda and Mishra (2020) underlined that while 'policy-capacity-technology' could act as a theory of change model, open and distance institutions need to invest in our collective understanding of 'learning' in a 'networked society' and work toward implementation of TEL in relation to contextual socio-cultural and educational ecologies.In a recent bibliometric study, Wang et al. (2024) underlined that technology acts as both facilitator and transformative agent, and that while digital literacy has been a necessity, critical and ethical use of technology and digital resources needs to be emphasised.Within the open education realm and with reference to open educational practices at any level of education and mode of delivery, as argued by Alton et al. (2024), TEL has introduced and complicated new and diversified academic identities in teachers, and, therefore, institutions need to nurture facilitative environments through policy, training/continuing professional development, and recognition of diverse academic work vis-à-vis TEL.The papers in the current issue of this journal directly or indirectly address this theme of 'TEL and open education'.
Author: Santosh Panda
Institution: Indira Gandhi National Open University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Science Applications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4404518702