Overview of papers on enhancement of European Higher Education as presented during the Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Rome, October 2016

Current challenges in the formal education system are related to the openness of (higher) education institutions for the public, for the opportunity of gaining open insight into research and teaching, and to the involvement of students in research more than ever. We will focus on the education for openness: Therefore, we will firstly present our lecture design at the University of Cologne, Germany, along with our online letters about research as an instructional design tool for raising students’ awareness for open science and education by encouraging them to exchange and share research experiences. Both involve undergraduate-students in a research-led learning process and encourage them to draft research designs and projects. The objectives are achieved, within the whole group of students, by tracing different questions, unfurling individual talents and increasing previous knowledge. After our short sketch of the setting, we will illustrate areas of conflict between studying, self-organization and openness on the basis of empirical data. Our findings externalize noticeable discrepancies between the strong focus on research on the one hand and measuring learning outcomes on the other hand, which led to student complaints. We will sum up how the disclosed conflicts are related to education for openness, and ask the research question: How could the developed research competencies be seen, while undergraduate-students should also be educated for openness?

Keywords

education for openness · formative assessment · instructional design · research-led learning