The objective of the paper is to provide a framework for understanding the pedagogical opportunities of openness in education. The paper will argue that openness in education should not only be viewed as opening existing resources and courses to a broader audience. Openness is also a matter of providing insight and enable communication and collaboration across traditional barriers – such as distance and accessibility. From this perspective, openness is the removal of barriers for interaction and exchange – and not only a matter of providing access to resources or courses. Rather, the objective is to open education to the outside world, which entails an interaction between educational institutions and society. The key point of the paper is that to do this, educational activities need to change and move beyond the course as the main unit of openness. Openness is not only a matter of opening up the existing, but to develop new educational practices that interact with the world. The paper outlines three different dimensions of openness that describe different types of interaction between institutions and society: transparency, communication and engagement. To exemplify the dimensions, the paper presents a case study that demonstrates the three dimensions of openness in an university programme. The paper concludes in a discussion of educational technologies for the different dimensions of openness.

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.

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