Does open matter for you personally?

May 6 2020 for #LiDA103

• Does open matter for you personally? Share your reasons why open does or doesn’t matter for you.
• What can we learn from the current state of affairs regarding access to scholarly knowledge? What advice do you have for the future of learning in a digital age?

Yes. open really matters. Maybe not every day to the most privileged, well represented learners, but the impact is profound for many of our students. Having been in higher education these past 20+ years, I have seen the loss of collegiality and rise of commodity when it comes to learning resources. This is not only being driven by corporate publishers, but also through cultural changes at colleges and universities that has shifted from free and open knowledge for all, to proprietary control of intellectual property.

Granted, everything has become punctuated acutely with COVID-19, but at my institutions over the past few decades, control of information as property and commodity has increased, and access to creative work, research and art has become more restricted, expensive and socially stratified. The future of learning in the digital age is a fluid and rapidly changing environment, where the economic and social models of the past can no longer sustain the current higher education model, and the old Western paradigm no longer adequately aligns with the majority of the world’s population of learners.

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