Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Open Learning on 14/01/2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02680513.2020.1713737
Accepted author manuscript, 558 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Openness and innovation in online higher education
T2 - A historical review of the two discourses
AU - Lee, Kyungmee
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Open Learning on 14/01/2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02680513.2020.1713737
PY - 2020/1/14
Y1 - 2020/1/14
N2 - This article tackles a critical question of “to what extent can online higher education (HE) be open and innovative at the same time?” To provide a more comprehensive answer to the question, the author takes up a notion of discourse and situates the analysis in a specific online HE setting: Athabasca University (AU). In this article, the author first unpacks how the openness and innovation discourses originally emerged in AU throughout its early years and how the original conceptualization of the two and their relationships have shifted in the more recent years. The results demonstrate that there has been an increasing level of discontinuity between the conceptualization of openness and innovation as independent principles and the operationalization of the two as competing principles in course design practices in AU. Being fully open to diverse student groups and being technologically innovative by integrating a state-of-the-art technology cannot be achieved in a single online course. In addition, being pedagogically innovative by increasing interactivity among students while maintaining the same level of flexibility provided by the independent study model seems very challenging. This article also discusses the institutional conditions that make teaching-oriented innovation more difficult to be achieved.
AB - This article tackles a critical question of “to what extent can online higher education (HE) be open and innovative at the same time?” To provide a more comprehensive answer to the question, the author takes up a notion of discourse and situates the analysis in a specific online HE setting: Athabasca University (AU). In this article, the author first unpacks how the openness and innovation discourses originally emerged in AU throughout its early years and how the original conceptualization of the two and their relationships have shifted in the more recent years. The results demonstrate that there has been an increasing level of discontinuity between the conceptualization of openness and innovation as independent principles and the operationalization of the two as competing principles in course design practices in AU. Being fully open to diverse student groups and being technologically innovative by integrating a state-of-the-art technology cannot be achieved in a single online course. In addition, being pedagogically innovative by increasing interactivity among students while maintaining the same level of flexibility provided by the independent study model seems very challenging. This article also discusses the institutional conditions that make teaching-oriented innovation more difficult to be achieved.
KW - Distance education
KW - open university
KW - learning designer
KW - discourse analysis
KW - text analysis
KW - Foucault
U2 - 10.1080/02680513.2020.1713737
DO - 10.1080/02680513.2020.1713737
M3 - Journal article
JO - Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning
JF - Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning
SN - 0268-0513
ER -