Distance Education

Vol. 33, No. 2, August 2012, 135150

A review of the role of national policy and institutional mission in

European distance teaching universities with respect to widening
participation in higher education study through open educational
resources
Andy Lane*
Department of Communication and Systems, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
(Received 3 January 2012; nal version received 20 May 2012)
The open educational resources (OER) movement is relatively new with few
higher education institutions (HEIs) publishing or using them, and even fewer
using them to widen engagement or participation in HE study. Although distance teaching universities have been in the vanguard of widening opportunities
for HE study, they vary in how far they are doing so. Some use this informal
learning through studying OER as a bridge to formal learning; others see it as
an end in itself, often as part of a wider set of lifelong learning activities. Initial
experiences of some European distance teaching universities indicate that OER
are ne for condent and experienced learners but most people will require
other support mechanisms to achieve participation. More effort may be needed
to design and present OER in ways that are suited to the learners to support
their learning, including developing new ways to recognize achievements
through open study.
Keywords: open educational resources; widening participation; distance teaching; teaching methods; institutional mission

Introduction
Why should higher education institutions (HEIs) worry about increasing the number
or widening the type of people participating in the HE system? And what role
might open educational resources (OER) play in supporting this?
In many cases, HEIs worry about widening access of participation in HE study
because national and international education policy has long recognized that levels
of participation and attainment produce social and economic benets. An OECD
(2006) report was clear about the benets of wider and deeper educational attainment:
A well-educated and well-trained population is important for the social and economic
well-being of countries and individuals. Education plays a key role in providing individuals with the knowledge, skills and competencies to participate effectively in society and the economy. Education also contributes to an expansion of scientic and
cultural knowledge. The level of educational attainment of the population is a

*Email: a.b.lane@open.ac.uk
ISSN 0158-7919 print/ISSN 1475-0198 online
2012 Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, Inc.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2012.692067
http://www.tandfonline.com

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commonly used proxy for the stock of human capital, that is, the skills available in
the population. (p. 7)

While widening participation in HE has both a social and an economic dimension, the levels of educational attainment in a particular population may hide great
inequalities in the chances and opportunities to do so throughout all sectors in society. Some of this inequality in participation results from a number of elements: (a)
broad social and economic factors; (b) the way the higher education system in a
country is structured, nanced, and governed; (c) the way individual HEIs develop
and nurture their mission; and (d) the ways in which HEIs structure their teaching
operations (Lane, 2008, 2009).
If we consider the whole HE system within a country, the chance to participate is mainly constrained, rstly, by the absolute availability of places for study
within a country (e.g., the number of HEIs and the physical capacity of those
institutions to teach students). Of course, it is possible for citizens of one country to seek HE study in another country. However, this international movement
of students or local study in ones native country is constrained, secondly, by
the affordability of opportunities (for instance, involving great expense including
tuition fees and living costs) and thirdly, by its accessibility (such as being
taught in a second or third language or involving signicant travel for the student). Fourthly, there is a question of the acceptability of the opportunities on
offer (for example, the provision may be of poor quality; it may not make
adjustments for disabilities; or it may be in subjects prospective students do not
want to study). Whatever the level of public or private funding that is used to
support the HE system in a particular country there are inevitably constraints on
being able to match the supply of places with the latent demand due to the
inherent selectivity of non-universal HE. Nevertheless, even where provision is
readily or more freely available, affordable, accessible, and acceptable, it may
not be taken up by some less privileged groups in society for other, wider,
physical, social, and cultural reasons, as will be discussed later.
If we then look at individual HEIs, most have limits on the numbers they enroll
and they use various selection methods to determine entry (usually based on previous educational achievement as measured by formal qualications), and students are
largely registered on whole programs and not individual modules. Further, most
universities mainly deal with full-time students, and even part-time students still
have set timetabled programs to adhere to, which can be difcult for those in work
or with caring commitments even when they meet the selection criteria. They also
have xed campuses and the students have to largely come to the campus to participate in the educational experience on offer. Teaching methods can also be very limiting, with lectures given by an expert professor dominating, albeit with some use
of seminars, workshops, and laboratory or other practical activities, supplemented
by educational resources housed in a physical library or bookshops. It is largely an
individualized process where individual professors devise, specify, and deliver the
courses studied by individual students even though present as groups in a classroom. The students are therefore largely guided by the views of a single source
even though they may read the views of others in set texts.
In contrast, HEIs employing distance teaching methods sometimes have no entry
qualications to their modules or programs, are only limited in the number of students on a module by the availability of sufcient tutors to support the cohort, and

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may allow students to register for a single module at a time rather than upfront for
a complete degree program. They also invest in providing pedagogically robust
multimedia educational materials produced by teams of academic and media
experts, where there is a high degree of coherence and congruence between the contributions of the team but also where contrasting views can be expressed. The
media are also chosen carefully to have the most pedagogical impact for that area
of learning. They also then add a further layer of mediation through employing
tutors for set groups or batches of students on an individual module. Such tutors
help the students in their group to navigate and approach the materials in ways that
suit the students individual needs, recognizing that different students have different
learning styles and approaches. The tutor therefore facilitates the learning process as
much as directly reinterpreting parts of the teaching embodied in the educational
materials. This gives greater control of the learning process to the students themselves and allows them much greater exibility in organizing study around their
commitments to family and work. Furthermore, while individual modules are timetabled, students have more exibility in the order and times they study them, even
allowing for breaks in study thus enabling a full program of study to be completed
over many years.
Although claims can be made that distance teaching universities can serve
more students and different types of students compared to many campus-based
universities they still are subject to many if not all the same constraining factors
noted above that other HEIs face. However, the emergence of the OER movement has meant that the nature of the teaching methods and how they relate to
institutional missions in all types of HEIs, but particularly distance teaching universities, has never been more open or apparent to as many people. This raises
questions as to whether such OER offer new ways for more people to engage
with, or participate in, HE study, whether or not they are registered as a student
at a HEI. This article explores this issue specically through the activities of
certain members of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities
(EADTU; http://www.eadtu.eu) and contrasts this with the wider, if limited, literature on how OER may support differing institutional missions, including widening participation, and how new institutions and consortia are addressing some of
these same issues.
OER
OER have become a major focus of discussion and action within educational circles, particularly those related to HE. There are a number of names associated with
this movement, which began in the late 1990s but gained global prominence in
2001 when MIT launched its Open CourseWare initiative (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.
htm). Names such as open content, open educational content, open learning
resources, open educational technologies, open academic resources, and open
courseware are variously used in the literature and in online and face-to-face discussions; but it is the term open educational resources adopted at a UNESCO meeting
in 2002 that is most commonly used. There are also a number of denitions but this
modication of the original UNESCO denition is often quoted:
OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or
have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or

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re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools,
materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. (Atkins, Brown, &
Hammond, 2007, p. 4)

This denition does not make an explicit distinction between resources created
specically for an educational purpose (e.g., lecture notes) and those resources
that can be used for educational purposes (e.g., historical images from an
archive) but implicitly it is dealing more with the former. It does, however,
make clear that the resources should be openly licensed. Nevertheless it can be
argued that open licensing is more benecial to teachers who want to copy and
rework these educational resources than to students who may be satised by
open access that enables them to study those resources online (Lane, 2010).
To examine the effects of OER on widening HE study, the EADTU has used a
conceptual framework that, as already noted, views participation in HE to be limited
by the following:
availability of opportunities to participate (usually taken to be number of
study places available within HE institutions)
affordability of those opportunities (this could be due to issues such as the
cost of the opportunity in terms of fees and living costs)
accessibility of those opportunities (the ability to participate through a disability or ability to perform effectively due to the medium of instruction being a
second or third language)
acceptability of the opportunity (a more subtle issue exemplied by the mode
of instruction not suiting a students learning style or cultural norms making
either the mode of study or the study of certain topics difcult).
Inevitably, this leads to a tension between the provision of HE and the demands
by people wanting to experience that provision (and equally the demands expressed
by those setting education policies and those wanting to employ those who have
participated in HE).
This same framework can also be applied to the educational resources in the
form of learning and teaching content, as well as the hardware and software that
support that HE provision. In other words what is:
(1) the extent or availability of educational resources (how many of them in
what forms, both formal and informal)?
(2) the affordability of those resources (how much do they cost)?
(3) the degree of accessibility to those resources (where can they be found and
by whom), which help contribute to the level of use of those by learners (the
degree of engagement if not participation)?
(4) the acceptability of the resources, which can inuence not only the way in
which engagement and participation happens but also the way the experience
is valued?
To understand how OER might specically help with widening access to HE study
it is necessary to review how wider educational developments in Europe have shaped
policy and practice around open and distance education and widening participation.

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Widening participation policy in Europe

In the past 10 years or so there has been signicant development of the European
Higher Education Area (EHEA) following the Bologna Declaration in June 1999.
Now involving 46 countries within Europe, the rst 10 years of the Bologna process have seen much progress in achieving greater compatibility and comparability
in their collective systems of HE. Work on this is ongoing but the ministers responsible for HE in the 46 countries of the Bologna process1 have also looked at further
developments up to 2020 (European Union, 2009). The rst of their named priorities is about equitable access and completion:
The student body within higher education should reect the diversity of Europes populations. We therefore emphasize the social characteristics of higher education and aim
to provide equal opportunities to quality education. Access into higher education
should be widened by fostering the potential of students from underrepresented groups
and by providing adequate conditions for the completion of their studies. This
involves improving the learning environment, removing all barriers to study, and creating the appropriate economic conditions for students to be able to benet from the
study opportunities at all levels. Each participating country will set measurable targets
for widening overall participation and increasing participation of underrepresented
groups in higher education, to be reached by the end of the next decade. Efforts to
achieve equity in higher education should be complemented by actions in other parts
of the educational system. (p. 2)

Widening participation in HE in Europe is therefore seen as an important social

aim to be enacted within and across the countries belonging to the EHEA and that
this should be seen in the context of lifelong learning. This aim is also reected in
the European Universities Charter on Lifelong Learning (European University
Association, 2008), which asks universities to commit to, among other things,
embedding concepts of widening access and lifelong learning in their institutional
strategies, providing education and learning to a diversied student population,
and adapting study programmes to ensure that they are designed to widen participation and attract returning adult learners (p. 5). The Charter also asks governments to commit to recognizing the university contribution to lifelong learning as
a major benet to both individuals and society and promoting social equity and an
inclusive learning society (p. 8).

Dening widening participation in Europe

While widening participation may be a common aim within the countries of
Europe, it does not mean that there is a common, set denition for what it
entails. Widening participation, as opposed to widening access, is a relatively
new term used within HE policy and practice and one most debated and developed within the UK. For instance, it may be considered as a process, an outcome, or a type of student (Shaw, Brain, Bridger, Foreman, & Reid, 2007) or
as access as in-reach, access as out-reach, or access as exibility (Osborne,
2003). Inevitably, these aspects become entangled and overlapping as we examine the motivations of HEIs and learners alike. Accordingly, there is no settled
denition of widening participation but according to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (2011):

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Widening participation addresses the large discrepancies in the take-up of higher education opportunities between different social groups. Under-representation is closely
connected with broader issues of equity and social inclusion, so we are concerned with
ensuring equality of opportunity for disabled students, mature students, women and
men, and all ethnic groups.2

This denition identies that certain societal groups or communities may be

excluded from current educational provision (the type of student) and that a number
of factors may be involved (that involve the processes used to administer HE), and
it assumes equality of outcomes. While it may be simple to use socioeconomic class
as a major measure of potential exclusion, it is another matter to disentangle the
wide variety of reasons that effectively lead to this exclusion.
Starting with the type of student, within the literature related to widening participation in HE, some or all of the following reasons have been identied as potential
barriers to individuals from particular groups and communities engaging with the
available provision (David et al., 2008; Lane, 2009): geographical remoteness; cultural norms; social norms; prior achievements; absolute individual or household
income; digital divide; physical circumstances; individual norms; and institutional
attitudes and behaviors.
The converse to this student or learner view is the institutional view. Rather than
thinking about how such potential students may adapt to the prevailing HE provision, how well do HEIs themselves adapt their processes to make them more suitable for people facing such barriers? Equally, there are the issues of what
constitutes appropriate levels of attainment or achievement even when participation
happens: Do students have to complete their degree? Do they even have to pass
any examinations if their experience of HE gives them new condence or skills to
be able to, for instance, start up a small business?
Many distance teaching universities have been given the mission by their
founders and funders to widen access to HE and many have devised means of
overcoming or mitigating the effects of many of the barriers noted above
through their formal programs of study and sometimes through informal programs of study such as adult learning access programsaccess as in-reach
(Osborne, 2003)or community-based activities and eventsaccess as out-reach
(Osborne, 2003)and specialist schemes such as recognition of prior learning
access as exibility (Osborne, 2003). So how do the distance education ethos
and the missions of distance teaching universities help widen participation and
what role might OER play?

A brief history of distance education and open education

The philosophy of open education is longstanding although it may also be known
by other names such as exible education. The term open education implies that
traditional HE must be closed and taken out of the traditional classroom setting.
The books Opening Up Education edited by Iiyoshi and Kumar (2008) and Flexible
Pedagogy by Burge, Campbell Gibson, and Gibson (2011), and the Cape Town
Open Education Declaration (Shuttleworth Foundation, n.d.) all indicate a renewed
interest in how education, and particularly HE, may be made more accessible and
available to more people around the world through the use of new technologies and
new systems of teaching and learning and in particular OER.

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To some degree, this interest is returning to the issues outlined many years earlier by Ivan Illich (1971) in Deschooling Society where he argued:
A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who
want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all
who want to share what they know to nd those who want to learn it from them; and,
nally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to
make their challenge known. (Chapter 6)

However, Illich was also arguing for the de-institutionalization of society and
education within it, a more idealistic position. The authors of the Cape Town Open
Education Declaration were calling on educational institutions and individuals to
open up education from its current bounds as if this was a new development, and
did not mention the role that distance education or open and distance learning
(ODL) has already played. In particular, the discourse around the role of openness
in HE can be said to have seriously started with the inception of the Open University in the UK (OUUK) in 1969 (Woodley, 2011). While the use of distance teaching methodologies in HE predates this by a century (notably the University of
Londons external degree program) and was widely used by a number of institutions
in the Soviet Union and by UNISA in South Africa in the early twentieth century,
it was the OUUK that was rst named an open university (Tait, 2008). While the
choice of the title was a collective one it was the OUUKs rst chancellor, Lord
Crowther, who rst gave meaning to what openness might mean for the OUUK
(and possibly other open universities) when he said it would be open as to people,
places, methods and ideas in his inaugural speech. This is still reected in its mission (Open University, 2012) although how these four opens and openness in general are interpreted in practice has changed and is changing further with the advent
of OER (Gourley & Lane, 2009; McAndrew, 2010).
The plurality of possible meanings for openness implied in this one institutional
case is still reected today across the wider ODL movement (Anderson, 2009), with
many attempts to dene the essential characteristics of open learning, open schooling, or open education (but rarely it seems open teaching). In many cases distance
teaching institutions are found wanting on many aspects of openness as dened by
different authors. While not repeating these international debates in this article, a
notable trend among distance teaching universities has been the move away from a
discourse based on distance teaching to one of ODL partly to reect the position of
the learner rather than the institution. In contrast, the principle of open access as a
major aspect of openness (open as to people), whereby no previous educational
qualications are required before registering on an undergraduate course, and a central feature of both the OUUK and Open Universiteit Nederlands (OUNL) operations, is by no means universally adopted by other distance teaching or open
universities. A possible reason for this is that most open universities have been very
much state-led interventions as described in some detail by Tait (2008) and many
of these state-led interventions have been intended to t within the prevailing social
and HE systems in their respective countries, often raising particular issues of comparability with campus-based HEIs.
In one sense, distance teaching universities practice ODL that potentially benets more people as it offers an alternative method to gain HE credits and qualications, one that is not tied to regular and frequent attendance at a campus for

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classroom-based teaching (Woodley, 2011). Their programs are usually modular and
allow for accumulation and transfer of credits for those geographically remote or in
employment who feel unable to take up full-time study. In other words, openness is
often seen as a necessary but not necessarily sufcient factor in widening participation in HE.
Whereas, as argued above, ideas of openness were largely centered on ODL
institutions in the late twentieth century, since the beginning of the twenty-rst century we have had the rise to prominence across all HEIs (and beyond) of additional
names and ideas to consider, such as open content (Wiley & Gurrell, 2009), open
courseware (Carson, 2009), and OER (Casserly & Smith, 2008; Caswell, Henson,
Jensen, & Wiley 2008), all based upon open licensing (Bissell, 2009) and driven by
the emergence and spread of digital technologies. And in contrast to open universities, these open movements have mostly not been state interventions but have arisen
through the acts of institutions themselves and wider communities sponsored by
philanthropic foundations, although some governments are beginning to take note
of these movements (Kumar, 2009).
Much of HE is based upon students coming to the institutions campuses to participate in the educational experience. In contrast, open universities have sought to
open up HE to greater numbers and teach and support students in a greater diversity
of ways by taking the learning to where the student is. What is clear is that learning
in classrooms with a teacher at the front is now a small part of the complete picture
and that individuals will be undertaking a wider range of learning opportunities,
both formal and informal, throughout their lives, by themselves, in groups, at home,
and at work, to name but a few modes. Nevertheless, the physical nature of much
educational provisiontied to a particular place, bound up in a particular mediumtext or audiovisual assetsand available only at predened timesmeant
that the locus of control was much more with the providers of learning opportunities than the usersthe learners.
The advent of digital technologies and the Internet in particular is changing this
dynamic because it helps remove some of these barriers, making digital content
much more accessible, available, and affordable and enabling new forms of instantaneous communication between people in different places and times (Kirkpatrick,
2011). Coupled with some rights reserved open licensing (Creative Commons,
n.d.), for example, the Creative Commons licenses, the philosophy of OER is that
you want people to take it away and do things with it. In principle, this gives learners (and teachers) even more freedoms as they can decide when to access it,
whether they want to alter it, and how they learn from it because of the potentially
non-destructive, replicable, and recorded nature of the original material and all versions they make of it. But equally, such OER are also a new and more open window into the teaching methods of an HEI and equally can reect something of that
institutions mission.
Institutional mission and widening participation in European distance teaching
universities
There has not been much written about how OER relate to the institutional mission
for HEIs. In the UK, most institutions participating in the public funded UKOER
program were more concerned with the technicalities of publishing OER and how
OER may help their teachers and students than with the scope of OER to help with

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access as in-reach or out-reach (Osborne, 2003), although most did see ways in
which they were aligning their OER work with some part of their institutions strategic activities (Littlejohn, Falconer, Beetham, & McGill, 2011; Yuan, MacNeill, &
Kraan, 2008). In part, open education is increasingly being conceptualized as more
than just OER and moving toward dening open educational practices and resultant
maturity models trying to capture greater elements of openness in the teaching and
learning policies and practices of HEIs (Ehlers, 2011). Such maturity models also
recognize that signicant changes will take time and that not all HEIs will necessarily adopt all features of a truly open model of teaching and learning. They also
reect the same issues of time needed to experiment, evaluate, and implement that
have arisen with the adoption of technology-enhanced learning and distance teaching (Kirkwood, 2011). Nevertheless, as noted above, distance teaching universities
have had a longer history of matching their activities to a more open mission and
equally have been at the forefront of many OER activities.
The EADTU has been working with distance teaching universities in Europe
since 2006 on collectively understanding and developing strategies for publishing
and using OER. This began with an EADTU taskforce on Multilingual Open
Resources for Independent Learning (MORIL) funded by two grants from the USbased William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. These grants enabled the partner
institutions to work together to share best practices among themselves and with
other HEIs and regional distance teaching associations. More recently, a new grant
from the European Commission under the Erasmus Lifelong Learning Programme
has enabled this work to continue and focus on particular aspects of OER. This
new Innovative OER in European Higher Education (OER-HE) project included 11
European university partners (EADTU, 2011).
This article now reviews the main ndings from one work package of the OERHE project, which was a scoping study dealing with best practices for widening
participation in HE study through the use of OER among six of the partners. The
study drew upon the knowledge and experiences of those European partners, most
of whom have long track records in widening participation in HE, and some of
whom are leaders in the emerging eld of OER. In particular, the project partners
developed a set of case studies by reviewing the widening participation policies in
their own countries along with the widening participation policies and practices at
their own distance teaching institutions. These descriptive case studies were then
analyzed and compared for differences and similarities in key features. A summary
of the key ndings are presented for six institutions and countries in Table 1 with
further details and a fuller account available in Lane (2011) and Lane and Van Dorp
(2011).
Although the number of cases shown in Table 1 is limited, it is still clear that
there is wide variation in how widening participation is viewed and enacted in those
countries and how much the associated distance teaching institution is able to help
with widening access or participation in any way. The six institutions are also at
very different stages in their engagement with OER, with those who have been
established as distance teaching universities for more than 20 years (Anadolu,
OUNL, and OUUK) having signicant OER experience compared to the other three
universities. Even so, while both OUNL and OUUK have more than 5 years experience with OER, and are thus among the early adopters of OER worldwide, both
are still developing and implementing their long-term OER strategies and how those
relate to their open missions (Gourley & Lane, 2009; Schuwer & Mulder, 2009)

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Table 1. Main characteristics of widening participation policy and widening participation

practices at six distance teaching universities in six European countries (adapted from Lane,
2011, pp. 3174).
Distance teaching university
Anadolu University, Turkey

Widening participation characteristics

The Turkish HE system has a very centralized

Hellenic Open University, Greece

structure run by the Higher Education Council

(Yksek retim Kurulu or YOK).
Widening participation in HE is one of YOKs
priorities.
Turkey has much greater demand for HE study
than can be fullled by the HEIs.
Widening participation is about accommodating
this demand and is not focused on particular
groups.
Anadolu University is a principal vehicle for
increasing participation (44% of all HEI students
in Turkey are Anadolus ODL students) but is
also trying to reach new groups and those unfamiliar with studying at a distance by providing
open access resources through a number of initiatives. Currently, most openly published resources
are open access only and not given a Creative
Commons license.

There is little attention to widening participation

in Greece.

The Hellenic Open University was set up in 1997

with a primary aim of supporting increased participation by those who pass the necessary state
examinations but who are unable to go to the
other 18 universities.
No attention has yet been given to using OER to
support engagement or participation with HE
study.
Open Universiteit, Netherlands

OUNL has always had an open access policy and

been the main HEI in the Netherlands seeking to

widen the scope of participation in HE study
through ODL.
Dutch governments have proposed a number of
policies and schemes to address both increasing
and widening participation.
OUNL has developed or is involved in a number
of grant-funded institutional and national initiatives that utilize OER to increase engagement and
participation with HE study, including providing
new bridges between informal and formal study.
The OpenER project has been particularly successful and enabled much research and evaluation
work to be carried out into the impacts of OER.
From these experiences OUNL has been rethinking their own strategy and business models so as
to incorporate OER into them.
(Continued)

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Table 1. (Continued).
Distance teaching university
The Open University, UK

Widening participation characteristics

Widening participation has been a strong theme in

Universidad Nacional de
Educacin a Distancia, Spain

national HE policy for some years with special

funding and targets set for HEIs in recruiting nontraditional students from groups suffering multiple
deprivation. This has also led to substantive
research and evaluation effort into widening participation.
The OUUK has always had widening participation
within its mission and has been largely addressing
this through optimizing its open access policy and
in its supported open learning model. This also
involves addressing both barriers to particular
types of students and trying to change its own
ODL processes to better suit target groups.
The OUUK has also had a signicant number of
OER initiatives that have variously helped
research and evaluate the impact of OER on students and learners in general.
Research on OpenLearn, the most signicant initiative, has shown that individuals and groups
have been able to use OER to undertake informal
and non-formal study for interest and for particular work-related needs and also to help orient or
prepare them for HE study. The role of informal
or formal organization or groups that act as intermediaries between the OER and the learners has
often been crucial to success.
The OUUK is now using OER to support and
enhance many of its existing systems and processes as well as looking at how it may provide
new business models or ways of constructing and
delivering ODL. It also sees OER as critical to its
social justice mission and in supporting capacity
development in developing and emerging economies.

Spain does not have national policies on widening

participation.

UNED has a strong set of policies that seek to

both increase and widen participation by certain

groups in society.
UNED has begun publishing OER in a number of
ways to support entry into HE at their own institution and more widely.
Universitre Fernstudien
Schweiz, Switzerland

Switzerland is trying to increase and widen participation in HE study but this is not very structured.
Universitre Fernstudien Schweiz has been trying
to increase the numbers of people participating in
HE study through ODL.
As yet there has not been any use of OER to help
increase or widen participation.

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and therefore by no means fully mature according the maturity model matrix noted
earlier (Ehlers, 2011). Equally, the institutions do not readily have mechanisms to
gather informative data on the impacts of OER on HE study, either on informal
learners or registered students. Web analytics can show many visitors to an OER
but not whether they learned from it in any meaningful way (for instance, the
OUUKs OpenLearn Web site has had over 20 million unique visitors over 5 years
but only a little over 200,000 have registered on the site and can be seen as potentially being active learnersmany of the others might be as well but we do not
know who they are because they can simply access the OER through a browser).
They can indicate referrals from an OER to registration as a student but not whether
that registration would have happened anyway (again, experience with OpenLearn
is that up to 1000 people per month go directly from it to register on a formal
taught module but the broad characteristics of those people are no different from
those coming from other recorded marketing or informational channels with twothirds being existing students anyway). Measuring such impacts of OER is very
challenging and the subject of much debate and activity because engagement by
learners with them is so open and is difcult to track and most evidence is anecdotal or from small qualitative studies (Masterton & Wild, 2011).
The initial experience with OER of EADTU members also indicates a large and
often unfullled desire for adult learners to be able to convert or trade in their informal studies for more formal or readily recognized credits, certicates, or qualications given by organizations or their peers (EADTU, 2011). Collectively, they are
exploring the possibilities that new technologies open up for the recognition of
achievements gained through individual, group-based, or long-term participatory
learners but there is a lot more work to be done to create cost-effective and credible
systems and processes. It is notable that other institutions have also taken up this
challenge of credentialing open study with announcements and discussion around
the OER university concept3 and the MITx project4 to offer open courses. This recognition of informal study is now being extended into new forms of credentialing
though the use of badges as in the Mozilla Open Badges project.5 Creating teaching
experiences that eliminate barriers to students taking part in those experiences is not
new, as exemplied by recent experiments with massive open online courses, as
described in Parry (2010), with mixes of formal registered students and informal
learner followers or projects such as the openED 2.0 project,6 which is a fully free
and open course that has been put together from existing OER by a consortium of
European universities. It is notable that much of the course development was done
in the open and was freely visible on their Web site. Similarly, there are a number
of community-led initiatives trying to do similar things, such as the Peer-To-Peer
University7 and WikiEducator,8 where there are opportunities to co-create content,
or to teach or support learning, or do both.
Conclusions
OER have been around for over 10 years but even now only a very small proportion of HEIs are involved with publishing OER although the momentum is increasing as OER are adopted into national and/or institutional policies. Moreover, it is
only in the past 4 years that there has been any signicant acknowledgement of the
proposition that OER can widen engagement or participation in HE study as
opposed to just making educational materials more available, more accessible, and

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more affordable to more people. Distance teaching universities have been in the
vanguard in this area because their missions have been driven by widening opportunities for HE study. Nevertheless, even among the six cases noted in this article,
there is wide variation in how far OER are being published and used and also how
far those institutions are addressing the requirement to widen participation through
formal study programs, let alone through OER. Equally, they are not able yet to
measure in any meaningful way how OER are truly widening either formal participation in HEIs or informal engagement with HE study. This in turn raises questions
as to what constitutes acceptability of OER and their study to learners.
Nevertheless, from this review it is possible to note that there are a number of
innovative initiatives to widen participation in HE study where OER contribute both
among distance teaching universities and traditional campus-based institutions. A
key nding is that many people who are not currently students value being able to
freely access and learn from self-study OER taken from distance teaching universities compared with recorded lectures or slide presentations. Some use this informal
learning as a bridge to formal learning but others see it as an end in itself, often as
part of a wider set of lifelong learning activities. This latter point raises questions
over how we should dene and record participation in HE study as opposed to the
more standard denition of participating in HE by being registered on, and successfully completing, a formal program at an accredited HEI (there is a related issue of
how much formal or informal study constitutes engagement or participation). Such
peer-driven recognition mechanisms like open badges and e-portfolios may provide
one solution to this issue that both complements and supplements formal HE
accreditation.
Although OER provide some freedoms that can address the barriers to HE for
people and communities who may otherwise be excluded from meaningful opportunities, it is still very early in the development and use of OER to fully understand
how big an impact they may make. The initial experiences within the cases, however, highlight the signicance of targeted interventions made by key individuals or
organizations at a local or contextual level. In other words, OER are ne for condent and experienced learners but most people who are targeted as part of widening
participation schemes are unlikely to be so condent and will require other support
mechanisms to achieve participation. This article argues that it is not just how
teaching mission and practice are reected in OER that will help widen participation, necessary though that may be, but how institutions use openness more widely
to support their existing widening participation strategies and practices.
Acknowledgements
This work was undertaken as part of the OER-HE project led by EADTU (http://www.eadtu.
eu) and funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus Lifelong Learning
Programme, within the Virtual Campus strand (http://www.eadtu.eu/eacea-lifelong-learnin.
html).

Notes
1. The Bologna process is a collective effort by public authorities, universities, international organizations, and institutions. Although the process goes beyond the European
Unions borders it is closely connected with EU policies and programs. See http://www.
ehea.info/

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A. Lane

2. Disabled students are implicitly included in this broad denition but disability discrimination legislation means that such students are specically and explicitly dealt with in
practice, in the UK at least (see http://www.hefce.ac.uk/widen/sldd/legis.asp).
3. See http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/Home
4. See http://web.mit.edu/newsofce/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html
5. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges
6. See http://www.open-ed.eu/
7. See http://p2pu.org/en/
8. See http://wikieducator.org/Main_Page

Notes on contributor
Professor Andy Lane has been at The Open University in the UK since 1983 and was
director of The Open Universitys multi-award winning OpenLearn Initiative (http://www.
open.ac.uk/openlearn) from 2006 to 2009. He has worked on a number of UK, European,
and global OER projects.

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