Dimensions of Openness

Open Pedagogy Toolkit -- Dimensions of Openness

Several dimensions of openness appear repeatedly across the literature on OER, Open Educational Practices (OEP), and open pedagogy. This emerged from my literature review and represents one possible way to synthesize these trends.

These dimensions are not a checklist, nor must every open pedagogy project address all of them. Rather, they provide a set of lenses for thinking about how openness operates within teaching and learning. Some projects may emphasize access and permissions through the use of OER. Others may focus on participation and power through collaborative knowledge creation. Many combine several dimensions at once. 

Together, these dimensions help us move beyond a narrow understanding of openness as simply "free access" and toward a richer understanding of how openness can shape relationships among learners, educators, communities, and knowledge itself. 

• Access

  One of the oldest and most widely recognized dimensions of openness is access. At its most basic level, access concerns reducing barriers that prevent learners from fully participating in educational opportunities. These barriers may be financial, technological, geographic, institutional, or accessibility-related. 

  Within higher education, access is often associated with Open Educational Resources (OER). Replacing costly textbooks with freely available course materials can help ensure that all students have access to required resources from the first day of class. Research consistently shows that textbook costs can influence whether students purchase materials, delay access to course content, or attempt to complete courses without required resources. From this perspective, openness can help broaden participation by removing financial obstacles to learning. 

  However, access extends beyond cost alone. Materials that are available online, accessible to learners with disabilities, offered in multiple formats, or designed to support diverse learning needs can also increase access. Similarly, educational experiences that connect learners across institutions, communities, or geographic boundaries may expand opportunities for participation. 

  While access is an important dimension of openness, many scholars note that access alone does not guarantee meaningful learning or participation. Simply making resources available does not automatically empower learners or transform educational relationships. For this reason, open pedagogy often builds upon access while also considering questions of participation, agency, collaboration, and power. 

  Examples of the Access Dimension 

  • Replacing a commercial textbook with an openly licensed textbook or course materials. 

  • Providing course materials in multiple accessible formats, such as text, audio, and captioned video. 

  • Creating publicly available learning resources that can be used by students beyond a single course. 

  • Designing assignments that do not require expensive software, equipment, or subscription services. 

  • Sharing teaching resources that enable other educators to adopt or adapt effective instructional practices. 
• Permissions

  A second dimension of openness concerns permissions: the rights and freedoms that determine how educational materials can be used, adapted, and shared. While access asks whether people can obtain a resource, permissions ask what they are allowed to do with it once they have it. 

  This dimension is closely associated with Open Educational Resources (OER) and open licensing. Open licenses, such as many Creative Commons licenses, grant permissions that go beyond traditional copyright restrictions. David Wiley's well-known "5R Permissions" framework describes these freedoms as the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute educational materials. These permissions allow educators and learners not only to access resources but also to adapt them to new contexts, improve them, combine them with other materials, and share the results with others. 

  From an instructional perspective, permissions create possibilities that may not exist with traditionally copyrighted materials. An instructor can modify an open textbook to better align with local learning outcomes. A department can collaboratively develop and update shared course resources. Students can contribute corrections, examples, explanations, or new content without encountering legal barriers to participation. 

  Many scholars have argued that these permissions are what make certain forms of open pedagogy possible. When learners are able to revise, adapt, and contribute to educational resources, they can move from being consumers of knowledge to becoming contributors and collaborators. For this reason, permissions are often viewed as an enabling condition for more participatory forms of teaching and learning. 

  At the same time, permissions do not automatically lead to open pedagogy. An instructor may use openly licensed materials in entirely traditional ways. The significance of permissions lies in the possibilities they create. They provide the legal and technical foundation upon which other dimensions of openness, such as participation and collaboration, can be built. 

  Examples of the Permissions Dimension 

  • Adapting an open textbook to reflect local examples, disciplinary priorities, or student needs. See the World History Textbook project example for more on this. 

  • Combining chapters from multiple OER sources into a customized course resource. 

  • Inviting students to revise, update, or expand openly licensed learning materials. 

  • Creating study guides, glossaries, or resource collections that future students can continue to improve. 

  • Sharing assignments, teaching activities, or instructional materials with colleagues under an open license so they can be reused and adapted. See ETSU Digital Commons OER collection for some examples of this.  
• Participation

  If access focuses on who can participate and permissions focus on what participants are allowed to do, the dimension of participation asks how learners actively engage in the creation, sharing, and development of knowledge. Participation shifts attention from educational resources to educational relationships and practices. 

  Traditional educational models often position students primarily as consumers of knowledge. They read assigned materials, listen to lectures, complete assignments, and demonstrate understanding through assessments. Open pedagogies frequently seek to expand these roles by inviting learners to become contributors, collaborators, and creators. Students may help generate course content, contribute to shared knowledge projects, provide feedback to peers, engage with authentic audiences, or create resources that extend beyond the boundaries of a single course. 

  Participation can take many forms. Some projects involve students creating openly available resources such as study guides, podcasts, timelines, websites, or instructional materials. Others emphasize collaboration through peer review, shared annotation, collective inquiry, or community-engaged learning. In each case, the focus is not simply on students receiving knowledge, but on their active involvement in shaping, interpreting, organizing, and communicating it. 

  Importantly, participation does not require that student work be public or openly licensed. The central question is whether learners have meaningful opportunities to contribute to the learning process rather than occupying exclusively passive roles. A collaborative class project, a shared knowledge repository, or a student-led discussion may embody the participation dimension even when the work remains within the course itself. 

  Many of the most recognizable examples of open pedagogy emphasize participation because it is through participation that learners often begin to see themselves as members of a disciplinary, professional, or civic community. Rather than merely studying knowledge, they begin to take part in its creation and exchange. 

  Examples of the Participation Dimension 

  • Students collaboratively create a study guide, glossary, or resource collection for future learners. 

  • A class develops a shared timeline, database, map, or digital exhibit. 

  • Students engage in collaborative annotation and discussion of course readings. 

  • Learners contribute resources, examples, or case studies that become part of the course materials. 

  • Students participate in peer review and revision processes that improve the work of the learning community. 

  • A class collectively documents and reflects upon its discussions, creating a shared record of its intellectual work. 
• Power

  The dimension of power asks who has influence within educational systems, whose perspectives are represented, and who gets to participate in shaping knowledge and learning. While access and participation are important, many scholars have noted that openness does not automatically redistribute power. People may be able to access resources or contribute to projects while still having little influence over decisions, priorities, or definitions of legitimate knowledge. 

  Open pedagogy often invites educators to examine traditional assumptions about authority and expertise. In many educational settings, instructors determine what knowledge is important, how learning will occur, what assignments students will complete, and how success will be measured. Open pedagogies may retain some of these structures while creating opportunities for students to exercise greater agency and influence. Learners might help select project topics, contribute examples and perspectives from their own experiences, participate in developing evaluation criteria, or collaborate in shaping aspects of the learning process. 

  Questions of power also extend beyond the classroom. Scholars have emphasized the importance of asking whose voices are represented within educational materials, whose knowledge traditions are recognized, and whose experiences may be absent or marginalized. From this perspective, openness is not only about increasing participation but also about creating opportunities for a wider range of people and perspectives to contribute to the creation and interpretation of knowledge. 

  Power is often one of the most challenging dimensions of openness because it rarely involves a simple transfer of authority from instructor to student. Rather, it involves thoughtful consideration of how decisions are made, how expertise is recognized, and how learners can participate meaningfully in educational processes. The goal is not necessarily to eliminate structure or guidance, but to create opportunities for greater agency, inclusion, and shared ownership of learning. 

  For this reason, many open pedagogy projects are concerned not only with what students learn, but also with how they come to see themselves as capable contributors to knowledge, communities, and disciplines. 

  Examples of the Power Dimension 

  • Students select topics, questions, or problems that are meaningful to them within the framework of a course. 

  • Learners help develop project criteria, discussion norms, or elements of an assessment rubric. 

  • Course materials intentionally incorporate perspectives and voices that are often underrepresented in traditional resources. 

  • Students contribute local, cultural, professional, or lived experiences that enrich the learning of the class. 

  • Community partners help shape the goals, outcomes, or products of a project. 

  • Students create resources, interpretations, or solutions that are valued as legitimate contributions rather than simply exercises completed for a grade. 
• Legibility

  The dimension of legibility concerns how visible, understandable, and navigable educational systems are to those who participate in them. Many aspects of education can appear opaque to learners. Students are often asked to use textbooks without understanding how they are produced, engage with disciplinary knowledge without seeing how it is constructed, or complete assignments without understanding the broader systems and assumptions that shape their learning experiences. 

  Open pedagogies frequently seek to make these systems more visible. Rather than treating knowledge as something that simply exists and is delivered to learners, open approaches may invite students to examine how knowledge is created, organized, validated, shared, and revised. Learners can begin to see not only what a discipline knows, but also how it comes to know it. 

  Legibility also applies to educational structures themselves. Students may gain insight into how copyright and licensing work, how scholarly publishing operates, how algorithms shape access to information, or how assessment systems influence learning. By making these processes more transparent, educators can help learners become more informed participants rather than passive recipients of educational systems. 

  This dimension is closely connected to agency. It is difficult to influence a system that one cannot see or understand. When students gain insight into the structures that shape knowledge, learning, and participation, they are often better positioned to navigate, question, and contribute to those systems. In this way, legibility supports many of the other dimensions of openness, including participation and power. 

  Legibility can also apply to educators. Openly sharing teaching practices, assignment designs, reflections, and educational resources can make the work of teaching more visible and accessible to colleagues. Rather than each instructor working in isolation, educational practices themselves become available for examination, adaptation, and improvement. 

  At its heart, the legibility dimension asks learners and educators alike to look behind the curtain. How are educational resources created? Who decides what counts as knowledge? How do information systems work? What assumptions shape the structures we inhabit? Open pedagogy often invites these questions into the learning process itself. 

  Examples of the Legibility Dimension 

  • Students examine how scholarly knowledge is produced, reviewed, and published within a discipline. 

  • Learners analyze who is represented, omitted, or privileged within textbooks, curricula, or information systems. 

  • A class explores copyright, Creative Commons licensing, and the creation of Open Educational Resources. 

  • Students investigate how algorithms, search engines, or AI systems influence access to information and knowledge. 

  • Learners contribute to projects that reveal the processes by which knowledge is organized, classified, or communicated. 

  • Educators openly share teaching materials, assignment designs, and instructional strategies, making pedagogical practice visible and available for adaptation by others. 

  Legibility has important connections to information literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, and AI literacy. Each of these educational movements encourages learners to look beyond information itself and examine the systems, processes, assumptions, and power structures through which information is created, organized, distributed, and interpreted. Open pedagogies similarly invite learners to understand not only what knowledge exists, but how it comes to exist, whose interests it serves, and how they might participate in shaping it. 

• Open Pedagogy and High-Impact Teaching Practices

  At ETSU, faculty may be more familiar with High-Impact Teaching Practices (HITPs) than with the language of open pedagogy. While these frameworks emerged from different scholarly traditions, they share many common goals. 

  Both seek to create meaningful learning experiences that move students beyond passive consumption of information and toward active engagement, reflection, collaboration, and authentic application of knowledge. Many open pedagogy projects naturally incorporate HITPs such as small-group learning, metacognitive reflection, community-engaged learning, and student leadership. 

  For example, students who collaboratively create a study guide, contribute to a public timeline, revise an open textbook chapter, or develop resources for a community partner are not only participating in open pedagogy. They are also engaging in active, student-centered learning experiences that embody many of the principles associated with HITPs. 

  Rather than viewing open pedagogy as a separate teaching approach, it may be useful to think of it as a complementary framework that can strengthen and extend High-Impact Teaching Practices. Open pedagogy provides additional questions for instructors to consider: Who has access? Who can contribute? Who makes decisions? How is knowledge created and shared? By attending to these questions, instructors can often deepen the impact of existing teaching practices while creating new opportunities for student engagement and ownership of learning. 

• References

  Bali, M., Cronin, C., & Jhangiani, R. (2020). Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective. Journal of interactive media in education, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565 

  Clinton-Lisell, V. (2021). Open Pedagogy: A Systematic Review of Empirical Findings. Journal of Learning for Development. https://doi.org/10.56059/jl4d.v8i2.511 

  Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18, 15-34. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3096 

  Cronin, C., & Maclaren, I. (2018). Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices. Open Praxis, 10, 127-143. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.10.2.825 

  Ehlers, U.-D. (2025). Extending the Territory: From Open Educational Resources to Open Educational Practices. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 15(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.61468/jofdl.v15i2.64  

  Paskevicius, M. (2017). Conceptualizing Open Educational Practices through the Lens of Constructive Alignment. Open Praxis, 9, 125-140. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.9.2.519 

  Wiley, D., & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i4.3601 

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