“Open Education does not threaten the teacher’s job, it makes it easier in many ways”
Name: Prof. Marc van Oostendorp
Position: Professor of Dutch and Academic Communication
Expertise: Linguistics, science communication
Institution: Radboud University
Country: The Netherlands
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An interview with Prof. Marc van Oostendorp on 15 October 2021
Tell us about your work with Open Educational Resources (OER), or Open Pedagogy more broadly? How did you come to be involved in Open Education, and have librarians supported you on that Open Education (OE) journey?
Before I worked here at Radboud University, I worked at Leiden University, and at some point about six or seven years ago, they were very actively involved in producing MOOCs (massive open online courses). So they had a strong policy on that and, I believe, the first ones were primarily aimed at professionals. I’m in the Humanities, and that was supposed to be “less professional”, so they were a bit hesitant about that, but then, at some point, they thought, “We want to do that as well,” and I made a MOOC, which turned out to be very big, and is still running. It is a MOOC on Coursera, and it has about 150,000 participants and is an introduction to linguistics, called Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics. You can still follow it, if you want. It was such a pleasure to make a real introductory course on this for a large group, and to learn how to interact with such a large group as an individual professor. So since then, I’ve been dreaming of doing more.
At Leiden University I think they have more or less abandoned their policy of producing MOOCs, to some extent. However, here at Radboud University, it was never really in place, I’m afraid. Actually, I regret that MOOCs seem to have been in fashion of five or six years ago and now they seem to be a little bit out of favor of some university boards.
In any case, I came to Radboud and basically grabbed the opportunity of Covid-19. Around the middle of March 2020, on the day the university board announced that the university would close and all teaching would move online, I thought that if we’re going to record classes anyway, why don’t we try to do more with that than just show it to our own students?
So I’ve been involved in a project called the quarantaine college (quarantine university classes) where we try to collect as many home videos made by professors teaching classes. I made my own and also took the opportunity to record my own class, and I’m still using that now. So here at Radboud, at this point in the pandemic, we’re basically back to normal teaching, but I decided to use this as a kind of informal flipping of the classroom. I use classroom hours now for discussing exercises and then I also ask the students to watch my online videos for the class. I guess that’s my basic involvement in online teaching. I have to say that I am also very interested in outreach, and I think I can say I’m quite active in outreach activities, including on video. The boundary between those two things is sometimes a bit unclear in my case. So for instance, this quarantaine college I made together with the University of the Netherlands, but they also present things which they also call college, but which are more like TED Talks by Dutch university professors. So the boundaries between those two things are sometimes a bit unclear, but there’s a big difference between online teaching and outreach.
Have librarians supported you on that Open Education journey? In Leiden or in Nijmegen?
So one of the things which really touched me in regards to this MOOC was when I received an email from a then-13-year-old girl from India who was apparently bored in school and whose mother had said to her, “Well, why don’t you do a MOOC?”
No, I can’t say they really have. Also, maybe because we didn’t ask for it. For the first MOOC, at Leiden, the university had a contract with Coursera, so Coursera is responsible for most of the technology. So there was a lot of support in terms of content, developing multiple choice questions (that can be answered by a hundred thousand people), and these kinds of things.
You can have librarian’s support in two ways, maybe through content, but probably more specifically for keeping the material. In Leiden, that wasn’t really necessary. I think for my more recent project, it could be helpful to have more help from librarians to keep everything in place. Hopefully, in post-pandemic times we are not going to go back completely to the old “normal”, and we’re going to still use this opportunity — where nearly everyone knows how to talk to their camera. I think it’s such a great opportunity to have that people who may have done a certain study program 20 years ago can go back to the classes they followed and see what’s new. Or people who are just really interested in a topic.
So one of the things which really touched me in regards to this MOOC was when I received an email from a then-13-year-old girl from India who was apparently bored in school and whose mother had said to her, “Well, why don’t you do a MOOC?” She was apparently very talented, and she did our MOOC, liked it, and came to us to tell us that she liked it. And now, just before Covid, I received an email from her saying that she was accepted at a top-tier American university, studying linguistics. So that was basically my dream with all of this.
Who has benefited from your Open Education at your institution, as well as beyond your institution? What have been the key benefits?
We have so much knowledge and it’s so easy to make it accessible to those people who are interested.
I think within the university, the key benefit for me and my students is that the course has improved by Open Education because there is essentially more time. I need to spend less time on explaining things, while the students need to spend a little more time watching the videos. One reason why I think it’s different from outreach is that it’s real classes. It’s aimed at people who have some background knowledge already, and additionally, they have some real interest in knowing the details of something. It’s not just telling some nice, funny story; it’s real, serious stuff. But there’s a lot of people who are interested in serious stuff and it’s both through the context of Nijmegen, or the Netherlands more broadly, or even the world. We have so much knowledge and it’s so easy to make it accessible to those people who are interested.
In Leiden, at first, there were quite a few people who were hesitant with doing a linguistics MOOC. There was one on terrorism studies and they thought what we were doing is just funny, but it turns out we were actually the most successful of all those MOOCs and that’s because linguistics is not typically something you need for your profession, but it is something that many people find interesting because it tells them something about themselves, about their lives, or what it means to be human.
MOOCs are also sometimes used as a kind of entrance requirement, so, for example, a program on speech therapy, for which you do not need to know about linguistics; what you do is follow this MOOC and do your own test afterwards, but the material is our course. The MOOC is released with an Open License.
What do you see as key successes in the Open Education movement, starting from your own experience?
Everything you would want to know about anything is accessible and at all different levels.
For me, it’s so clearly connected to the Open Access (OA) movement as well. So the main achievement is being able to take several steps in the direction of what I see as the ultimate goal: everything you would want to know about anything is accessible and at all different levels — so from an introductory level to being able to read all the papers. But more importantly, I think, is that the attitude has really changed toward this. Not always entirely for the good, for instance in the beginning, the concept of MOOCs was presented by some as a kind of replacement to live teaching, which it isn’t, and which it never can be. Neither myself nor any of the Leiden University team who were doing the older MOOCs ever saw it as that; it was never seen as a replacement. I think that was a reason why, for instance here in Nijmegen, they were hesitant about it.
However, it is also good to be a little hesitant about it because it is a real danger, especially in these times now when people say, “Well, everything worked perfectly online, so let’s just do everything online.” That is not just boring, but I think there are many things which, in the end, you can only learn from being physically present in a classroom. Being physically present in a classroom is an important thing. Online can never replace working in small groups with students, and that should always be a part of any kind of program.
What needs to be done for Open Education to truly take hold?
It’s important to convince people, particularly teachers, to do this kind of stuff without them worrying that it is threatening their job, because it’s not replacing your job, it’s making your job easier in many ways.
I think we still have to figure out what is the precise relationship between online teaching and live, physical teaching. So, what is the right balance between those two different things? It’s important to convince people, particularly teachers, to do this kind of stuff without them worrying that it is threatening their job, because it’s not replacing your job, it’s making your job easier in many ways.
Another part of the attitude, which I think we are slowly starting to see change, is the idealism behind this. It is not necessarily OA, that’s just about being online. But rather seeing this as our goal to educate, not just our own students but the world, that’s another key factor, and I’m optimistic about that. It’s not going rapidly, but it’s moving forward.
What are the most pressing challenges to Open Education?
That’s a problem with the OA movement, I think, more generally. Who in the end is going to pay? We have to understand that every institution is paying for themselves, and perhaps we in the Western world have an extra responsibility for this.
In addition to what I have already mentioned, one extra factor, I don’t think I’ve emphasised enough is this idea of competition between universities. Universities sometimes see themselves as “campus universities” so they want people to be on campus, not online. And, understandably, the whole idea of competition: universities don’t want to give away their stuff because they invest money in their teachers, but if a speech therapy department in America, for example, is using the content, they are not paying for it, so the university has invested in the MOOC and in the material, but somebody else can use it for free?
That’s a problem with the OA movement, I think, more generally. Who in the end is going to pay? We have to understand that every institution is paying for themselves, and perhaps we in the Western world have an extra responsibility for this.
What are your plans for the future with Open Education?
There is a plan now, actually in the spirit of what I just said about cooperating between different Dutch universities. As you mentioned, I’m a professor of Dutch, and that may sound a bit local but actually it’s not very local in the sense that the Dutch universities have about 150 freshmen combined for Dutch studies each year, but there are about 13,000 in the world. So it’s really more of an international enterprise than some people suggest. However, some of those students don’t have access to all the kinds of stuff that we have. So one plan is to make that happen, to make a course, an online Open Access course, for everybody who is interested in being up to date with what’s going in Dutch studies. It would be an international MOOC in Dutch. And for me, a MOOC is a real course — it’s not just a set of videos — it’s videos, reading material (which we provide), and tests to test yourself at the end and see whether you can get a certificate. So it’s the whole package. Most importantly, interaction with fellow students needs to be part of the package, so we have set it up so it’s still functioning on a whole structure of student assistants who are not necessarily studying linguistics, but who can answer some of the more basic or technical questions, as well as student assistants who know some linguistics. It’s kind of a pyramid and then I’m at the top; and honestly, in six years I don’t think I’ve ever had a question reach me. But I do still mingle with them as well, and have this kind of community of people, which is another thing you can do online, and which I think is an essential part of it too.
Any final thoughts?
I think one thing, at least for me, is that teaching is really about communication, and communication goes two ways. So the involvement of the teacher in all of the material. I mean, obviously you record stuff and then it’s used over and over again, but I think a course is a dead course if the teachers are never involved in it. So I can say I’m at the top of the pyramid, questions don’t reach me, but I don’t think I can leave the pyramid. Teaching is about people and I think that’s how we should definitely keep it. We have to think about how that works. It’s a human thing, a human interaction thing.
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