Open Teaching: a New Way on E-learning?

Abstract

Open Teaching is currently considered an ambiguous and polysemic concept but has nevertheless become a growing global trend in ICT-based education. To identify key issues on the subject, this article presents a study on Open teaching that combines meta-synthesis and content analysis of research published over the last twenty years in major peer-reviewed databases. Six main analytical categories emerge from data, conforming six groups of findings. Those findings show that Open Teaching has been associated with various concepts over the years and that there is no consensus on its meaning in the academic community. The current understanding of Open Teaching, that it is merely related to distance education, thwarts important practical and conceptual possibilities by prioritizing access as its main feature and ignoring important “openness” attributes, such as adaptation, sharing, remixing or collaboration. Moreover, the findings note that the most common means to implement Open Teaching as an ICT-based practice are derived from the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) which represents not only a major challenge for active educational practitioners but a new way of conceiving and implementing e-learning in higher education.