To begin this research program, the focus is on students and teachers. In their relationship to society and because OE redefines power imbalances between those who are supposed to know and those who are supposed not to. This with the backdrop of educational and digital literacy to develop the capability of evaluating the quality of information with a critical mindset.
Three parallel research tracks are thus foreseen for this research project:
• For teachers, the idea is first to check their capabilities to document their positionality with regard to teaching and learning and provide them with tools to do so. The aim here is to ensure their capacity to express their positionality and that it is aligned with what they claim to practice, using for instance the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (Pratt et al., 2001) and the Epistemological Development in Teaching Learning Questionnaire (Kjellström et al., 2016). The second step for teachers is to initiate, in a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) approach (Boyer, 1990) a thorough documentation of how Openness is implemented in their teaching practices and thus analyze their “beliefs about learning, knowledge, and the social role of “teacher.” (Pratt et al., 2000 ; Lameul, 2008).
• For learners, the idea is first to check their learning conceptions, for instance with the Concepts of Learning Questionnaire (Bowles & Hattie, 2016) and with the Conceptions of Learning Inventory (Purdie & Hattie, 2002). The second step is to initiate them to SoTL approach or to more basic reflexive capabilities (e.g. Boud, 2001) for them to document how Openness is perceived from teaching strategies (outside of student control) and learning strategies (within student control and responsibility for it).
• For education sciences scholars, the idea is to provide a literature review on key concepts related to Open Education at all levels: axiologic, ontologic, epistemic and practice.
Gaining insights from this first iteration based on praxis and following Sterling’s approach to sustainability (Salonen et al., 2023; Sterling, 2021) will provide data to scaffold the future of OE at the epistemic and research levels.