Many are searching for sustainable governance solutions in open education. Literature and past experiences suggest that governance of openness comes with different requirements as compared to governance of closed education. Further, open education systems do not behave like a simple linear system but rather tend to act as a complex system with multi facetted processes and a diversity of actors. Open education systems sometimes change fast and unpredictable. Traditional linear systems approaches and more reductionist views of reality do not offer suitable starting points for describing processes and designing governance of openness in education. An approach from the educational ecosystems perspective and complexity theory view offer more promising outlooks. Starting from these approaches, Educational Design Research is used to design and set up sustainable governance models for fourecosystems: an international open education framework for neuroscience nurses, an open platform for sharing and teaching anatomy resources, integrated re-use of OERs in a medical curriculum, and a national collective of university medical centers for curation and recommendation of OERs.
Design outcomes are evaluated and compared to answer the question whether the promise of the ecosystems perspective and complexity theory view have value for designing and setting up sustainable governance solutions for open education.
This presentation is made possible with the support of the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN): http://go-gn.net/
