7    Supporting Authentic Higher Education through Sustainable Open Learning Design

Kathy Snow

According to Tony Bates (2017), a leading Canadian researcher in the field of online learning as well as one of the key investigators of the Canadian National Online Digital Learning survey, which interrogates the implementation of technology for learning within postsecondary institutions, two key issues arise from the 2017 Canadian National Survey of Online Learning that have implications for open learning in higher education. First, many institutions in Canada lack clear documented strategies for open education. Second, where strategies are found, the most effective are those tied to the strategic mission and vision of the particular institution. It is particularly challenging in small teaching-intensive universities to set aside funds and personnel for formal strategic planning specific to open education and the creation or adoption of open resources. In this chapter, I examine the development of a strategy for open education at Cape Breton University (CBU) through a series of small-scale developments that might offer insights for similarly scaled universities in their own processes of sustainable open education policy development.

First, I frame the discussion presented here in a review of current literature related to open education and a definition and typology of institutional approaches. Next, I examine the importance of positioning: to what degree does the purpose of opening education affect the design of open education? This is aligned with the mission of CBU, which acts as a case study for policy development in context. Next, I share illustrations of open education approaches chronologically, discussing each in turn in relation to the impacts on faculty time, teaching experience, and resource needs. I then present analyses through comparisons of approaches, illustrations of the common themes that arose from each example, and how they contributed to the long-term strategy for open education implemented in 2016–17. Finally, I discuss implications for the future, with the aim of presenting evidence for other small universities evaluating their own open education strategies. The central bias presented by the case example, rooted in the mission and vision of the university, is relationship building—students with one another, students with the university, and the university with the local community. The development of the open education strategy fundamentally guided by relationship building and how CBU was able to balance this goal against institutional constraints form the thesis of this chapter.

Framing the Issues

Universities and other postsecondary institutions have been exploring methods of open education adoption since its inception; however, open education still tends to be an aberration rather than the norm (Hylen, van Damme, Mulder, & D’Antoni, 2012; Dhanarajan & Abeywardena, 2013; McGreal, Anderson, & Conrad, 2015). According to the Canadian report on postsecondary education, more than 85% of postsecondary institutions offer some form of online education, but only 35% report using open resources (Bates, 2017). In the subsequent results from 2018, greater insight into this statistic is offered and illustrates that it is particularly challenging for small universities to approach systemic or large-scale adoption of open education initiatives. It is also important to note that the definition of open, or opening, is variable and that institutions interpret opening from positions that reflect these variable definitions. Therefore, defining open, and positioning the case in the context of the operationally supported approach to open learning, are discussed in light of the current literature and form the basis of analysis of the success of the case in developing a sustainable approach to open education.

Defining Open Education

Open education is not a new concept, for both academic institutions and commercial enterprises have been interested in open learning design since the 1970s, and, depending on the purpose of being open, a variety of definitions of open have been developed (Fraser & Deane, 1997). As a concept, open is defined by McGreal, Anderson, and Conrad (2015) as “the provision of activities, programs and policies of access and the development of resources and MOOCs [massive online open courses]” (para. 1). This is a good basis for defining what open resources are, but the design and delivery of open education are far more complex.

In 2011, the Open Educational Resources (OERs) movement, jointly led by UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning, has posited that conceptualizing open in the educational sector should include only the design, development, and provision of “teaching and learning resources . . . that permit no-cost access, use, reuse and repurposing by others with no or limited restrictions” (McGreal, Miao, & Mishra, 2016, p. 1). Public postsecondary institutions generally define open more broadly as providing resources and educational content for free or at least at low cost (Campus Alberta, 2015; eCampusOntario, 2016; Jones, 2016). The development of OERs or open textbooks is an approach taken by some institutions, such as Open BC Campus (https://open.bccampus.ca). However, the current literature in Canada suggests that institutions think about open education practices such as open pedagogies that facilitate inclusion and access for all to transform learning (Camilleri & Ehlers, 2011; Carey, Davis, Ferraras, & Porter, 2015). Perhaps the difference between an open learning product and an open learning experience is best exemplified by the divergent pathways that MOOCs, probably the most high-profile open education initiative, have taken. In my observation, the term “MOOC,” as bandied about university campuses, has become synonymous with any fully online open course; in some minds, achieving mass enrolment in such a course is the gold standard for success. Although the origins of MOOCs are contested (Clarà & Barberà, 2013; Daniel, 2012), currently two major types of MOOCs are distinct. On the one hand, “cMOOCs” refer to connectivist-style MOOCs, wherein the purpose is to provide open access to “all who want to learn with available resources” (Daniel, 2012, p. 3), through an open pedagogy or experience. On the other hand, “xMOOCs” tend to be developed by either elite or private universities and are generally based on an instructivist perspective in education (Jones, 2016). They are thus based on the creation of a learning product that can be reused—an OER. Furthermore, xMOOCs focus on finding a market and seeking a return on investment (Jones, 2016). Therefore, xMOOCs, though advertised otherwise, are a step back in my view from the more widespread (and accepted) understanding of open as offering either cost-free or low-cost access to educational resources and activities. Alternatively, cMOOCs present a vision of learning that relies on group learning and concepts of crowd teaching (Dron & Anderson, 2014). According to Siemens (2015), one of the initial developers of MOOCs, a cMOOC focuses on networked learning and on participant autonomy and creativity that appear to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from xMOOCs with regard to educational philosophy. There is also the understanding that a cMOOC is platform independent, using any technology that can connect people and the products of their learning, which can include social media, a learning management system (LMS), or email aggregators.

The associated costs of the development of high-quality, reusable resources of these types do not necessarily fit departmental budgets. For instance, faculty members have identified the need for open initiatives that fit into regular practices in a way that can be maintained and sustained over the long term: that is, resources that would not become dated too quickly and that would maximize return for effort (Bowness, 2017; Crozier, 2018). This faculty need might also be why most larger institutions have adopted open textbook initiatives, rather than open pedagogies, since they represent an incremental change to current business models. However, the sustainability of any open education initiative or strategic policy depends on how we define open, how we facilitate open, and how we pay for, distribute, and work in the open (Downes, 2007; Tilak, 2015).

Impact of Open on How Universities Do Business

According to Davis, Little, and Stewart (2008), an examination of open education must begin with students’ needs, learning objectives, and the philosophical position of the institution in relation to the resources available. Next, the design of the course, its technological backbone (where it is hosted), and how it will be supported must also be examined, alongside institutional systems (e.g., registration, advising, quality assurance, etc.) and norms. Coherent frameworks that attempt to describe the dichotomies between what changes for learners and instructors at the microlevel (teaching), the macrolevel (systemic), the mental (cognitive), and the material (resources), as well as quantitative and qualitative experiences, are few and far between (Engström & Middleton, 1996). I could find no singular framework that described all aspects well. Instead, I developed the analysis of the case through a bricolage of frameworks, drawing on activity theory (Engström, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978), the theory of cooperative freedom (Dron & Anderson, 2014; Paulson, 1993), and finally Zawacki-Richter and Anderson’s (2014) micro, meso, and macro categorizations of distance education research. These three frameworks or lenses together offer insight into factors that shape the design and development of a strategy for open education.

The scale of the impact on an institution can be described based on Zawacki-Richter and Anderson (2014). A micro intervention is considered to affect only a given faculty member and his or her students in a specific teaching event. A meso intervention affects the institution systemically, such as by putting pressure on management, organization, and technology beyond a singular course. A macro intervention speaks to large-scale democratization of education and affects values regarding accessibility, ethics, and equity of education.

The qualitative experiences of learners and instructors can be described using the language of freedoms provided by the theory of cooperative freedoms and operationalized initially into a hexagon of freedom by Paulson (1993). Paulson provides a mechanism to describe the changes to place (where you learn), time (when you learn), pace (how fast or slow you learn), medium (the media used for learning), access (ability to learn regardless of qualifications or obstacles), and content (what you learn). Dron and Anderson’s (2014) adaptations of this hexagon created a decagon that added the learner experiences of technology (tools used for learning), method (the approach and pattern of learning), relationship (from whom you learn and how to engage with them), delegation (freedom to choose), and disclosure (freedom to decide what and to whom it is revealed).

Activity theory provides a description of the transactions among people, technology, and learning (Engström, 2009; Nardi, 1998). An activity system by definition is a multifaceted, voiced network of interconnections (Engström, 1991). In the most recent revision or third generation of activity theory, Engström (2009) summarized the five principles of change in an activity system as follows: interactive transactions among factors (prime unit of analysis), multivoiced, affected by history of change, existing with structural tensions (contradictions), and periods of reflection and evaluation that instigate new evaluation. This theory sets the stage for the beginning of the conceptual analysis, and I start with a review of the past.

The (In)Complete History of Open Education at CBU

In the context of my position as teaching and learning chair in Open, Online, and Blended Learning at CBU, as well as in my role as academic lead for the Educational Technology programs offered by the Department of Education for the School of Education and Health, I am regularly engaged formally and informally in conversations about course design, accessibility, and professional development for faculty with regard to the use of technology. As such, I have had opportunities to observe and be part of, if only tangentially, micro-, meso-, and macrolevel decisions on the development of teaching and learning at CBU using educational technology. Understanding the current context of the case starts with a journey into its past and the evolution of the overall educational technology strategy at the university. I am aware that the following story is not comprehensive and that others might have additional details or examples of practice. To describe the formal methods of this ethnographic examination of service design, I gathered data for this section from public documents and oral recollections of faculty and staff at CBU through informal conversations with me in my position in the university and not as part of a formal research investigation. Therefore, the history that I share here is also an unofficial version recounted with my own biases.

CBU Mission and Values

Cape Breton University is small, with annual enrolment in any given year being generally a bit below 2,500 full-time students. It is also one of the youngest universities in Canada, and, though it frequently appears in last place in alternate years in the Maclean’s Survey of Universities, faculty members take pride in a few statistics shared in this report. CBU tends to rank in the top 10 when it comes to student-teacher ratios and authentic research opportunities for students. This speaks to the core values and mission of the university. Born from the need to serve the remote island population, CBU (re-)established itself in 2004 as a primarily undergraduate university providing liberal arts education for students who wanted to stay on the island. Although face-to-face programming dominates the university, a few departments dip into online learning, with two of them offering fully online degrees. In both fully online programs, the majority of students are located in Nova Scotia; however, both national enrolment and international enrolment are growing. As the beginning of a round of federal austerity measures affected all institutions of higher education in Canada in 2014, CBU started exploring ways to streamline operations and increase enrolment dollars.

Pre-2014 Technology Use and Adaptation for Education at CBU

In 2014, the CBU campus-wide Department of Distance Education (DE) consisted of one full-time person. The small size of the university meant that very few people on campus were delegated specific online learning tasks. In addition to the lone distance education administrator, a second centralized support was the administrator of the campus LMS, who worked in the Department of Information Technology (IT), which offers general hardware and software installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting support for faculty members and students alike. As on university campuses across Canada, the DE department experienced shifts in centralization and decentralization prior to 2014. Initially, the DE department was a centralized service for the whole university, housed within the Extension Department, which coordinated all of the certificate and diploma programming and shared the Master of Education degree with Memorial University in Newfoundland. All academic units developed materials through the support of the DE department, which therefore had a larger number of employees and resources. In 2009, the Extension Department was replaced by the offering from the Department of Education of a Bachelor of Education program alongside the teacher education programs that had constituted the majority of the certificate and diploma programming at the university. Development and maintenance of online offerings became the responsibility of each academic unit. The DE staff member hired after the change in 2009 was responsible for coordinating and supporting the enrolment of online students. The Department of Education included in the job description of its new manager of teacher education responsibilities for technical support for faculty members and students and online course development for the graduate-level programs offered (the aforementioned certificates, diplomas, and master’s program courses). This was the only department in the university based on an online learning position. This was not surprising given that it was also the largest developer of online learning offerings. Outside the Department of Education, the Department of Communities and Connections offered a Bachelor of Arts degree that could be taken largely online, as did a few other departments on campus. In the absence of a central authority or strategy for online learning (beyond the university’s adoption of Moodle as the LMS in 2009), departments were free to develop their own strategies for online learning. Up to this point, no department at CBU had offered any open course.

Developments in the Department of Education, 2014–15

In the 2014–15 academic year, enrolment in the Department of Education consisted of 38 on-campus undergraduate students, 15 community-based (blended) undergraduate students, 12 blended graduate certificate students, and 156 fully online students in one of five graduate certificate or master’s programs (T. Macdonald, Manager of Teacher Education, personal communication, 2015). This meant that 42% of the students in education were online and “invisible” to the campus community in a university that predominantly promotes face-to-face interaction. The fact that they were invisible in the system factored into the decisions that followed for online learning design. Given that administration determined resource allocation, it was not really aware of or able to account for these students through the usual systems in place (a problem compounded by the nature of enrolment in education programs, which occurs in May rather than the usual September and January intakes). As a result, financial supports did not entirely follow student numbers. The resources to support online learning, having been dismantled prior to 2009, were spread out across the campus and found in unusual places. Naturally, faculty members were responsible for all aspects of the design, implementation, and delivery of online learning. They could turn to the central IT department for technical support and to the teaching and learning centre for online learning pedagogy and practice help, and support for social media and graphic design was provided by the Marketing Department. In 2014, the Department of Education started exploring opportunities to offer graduate education courses with open options. The department did so at the teaching or microlevel of course interventions. The primary aim of opening up graduate courses was based on Dewey’s (1916) “learning by doing” pedagogy, asking educational technology students to participate in alternative models of education through authentic experiences and to support the building of a community of practice for distance education students. A secondary aim arose from discussions in departmental meetings: offering open content as a means of increasing both the campus and the community profile of the department. The goal of interventions at this level was not to offer fully open courses but to explore the possibilities of open education in the educational technology program, given our resources and limitations.

The primary resource in the Department of Education was human: our students and all of our faculty members, many with extensive experience in teaching and engaged in exploring technology-enhanced teaching and learning. In terms of financial resources, the budget for interventions was limited, falling within the normal course operating budget. Interventions were thus designed and implemented by faculty members with the aforementioned supports available. They therefore needed to be simple to implement, and that made readily available social media platforms attractive. This led to another critical limitation that needed to be assessed: although CBU itself had no official policy on the use of social media for teaching, Nova Scotia had (and still has) some of the most restrictive policies in Canada in relation to information, data, and privacy protection in the form of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and Personal Information International Disclosure Act (Server Cloud Canada, 2016). To mitigate any potential risk to participants and liability of the university, I adopted an informed consent approach through the use of a social media field trip waiver adapted from the current CBU field trip waiver (Snow, 2017) since all potential users of our content would be adults engaged in learning about online learning. Students were always given the option of non-participation without ramification for grades; however, when they did choose to participate, it was with the full knowledge of the “dangers” of participation in the “wilds” of social media. With that in place, three interventions were designed.

Facilitated Conversation Around a Twitter Hashtag

In one course, students were given an assignment to join Twitter and to tweet once a week using the course hashtag IDTIPS. In preparation for Twitter use, students discussed the advantages of using real or anonymized personas in Twitter as well as the impacts that tweets can have on careers or personal lives. Students who did not feel comfortable using Twitter were given the option of participating in an LMS discussion forum instead. I monitored both the hashtag and the discussion forum to ensure that both groups recognized my presence. There were no set synchronous times for tweeting, giving the students freedom of time, medium, and disclosure (Dron & Anderson, 2014). Students were also asked to respond to at least one tweet a week posted to this hashtag as well as to curate their Twitter feeds by following others in the field. Students chose from whom they would learn and had a degree of autonomy in what they would learn. I seeded the hashtag weekly with concepts from the course. In some cases, I posed specific questions or challenges to students. To encourage participation from those not enrolled in the course, I created small mediating artifacts, for example YouTube videos with requests from others to respond to videos. Alternatively, open journal articles/reading materials were shared.

Finally, simple questions or requests for readers to create and share artifacts of their own were proposed. One such student creation, a diagram of the instructional design process, gained a great deal of traction for the student, being retweeted over 100 times the week after it was initially shared. Rather than being assessed on their participation in the Twitter activity, students were assessed on their personal evaluations/reflections at the end of the 10-week experience.

Using social network analysis tools to evaluate the impact of this intervention, it was found that, though a small cluster of communication developed, it remained focused on the instructor, and many students were actually talking to themselves. The hashtag was successful in attracting attention from instructional designers and other professionals in the field, though it remained student driven. It did have the effect of increasing the notoriety of the instructor and, perhaps by extension, the university. Indeed, the level of communication on Twitter caused a rise in my profile as was evident from an increased number of followers and comments made directly to me by instructional designers whom I met at subsequent conferences along the lines of “Oh, you are the one from Twitter. . . .” Participating students’ informal comments to me highlighted that one of the primary opportunities that the hashtag offered was a space for students from previous classes to reconnect with one another (since distance education students had no central organizing space beyond courses within the LMS that ended each term).

Sharing Classroom Products on the Department of Education Facebook Site

The nature of Twitter meant that, as soon as a course was over, the major activity of the hashtag also disappeared. Activity on the hashtag was also isolated to educational technology students. In a discussion stemming from a departmental meeting, faculty decided to try to increase engagement with the public by sharing products of courses through the departmental Facebook page. Within all courses, at both the graduate level and the undergraduate level, students were invited to participate in an open informal learning community on Facebook. Rather than asking students to create their own blogs or digital artifacts on their own sites and sharing them privately with the instructor, this intervention aimed at elevating the status and meaning of their work by promoting it through digital curation on the departmental Facebook site. The initial intention of the site was to promote the department and to share information about educational events with the local community. However, with the adoption of this type of sharing, a stronger bidirectional learning community emerged.

To avoid duplication of effort, one person, the administrative coordinator for the graduate programs, was in charge of posting updates. All faculty members were invited to suggest posting students’ products after first obtaining the appropriate permission from any course conducted in the department. Consent was determined by receiving a simple email from students whose work would be shared. To avoid pressuring anyone to share work, it was suggested that students not be asked to share items until the end of the term, though this was left to the discretion of the individual instructor. Students were also asked whether or not they wanted to be identified with the shared work. Their products, such as essays in blog form or teaching resources, would be linked and shared on the Facebook site with commentary about their applicability for teaching.

A short description of the item was then created by the faculty member and passed on to the coordinator. This required a little work outside the normal parameters for teaching; however, requests from instructors were unanimously seen as positive by students, who took great pride in sharing their work. It was determined through social network analysis that this intervention gained far more traction in the local community than our previous efforts at engaging the community in the Department of Education.

There were exponentially more shares and comments appearing in multiple clusters beyond the teacher-centric responses found in the previous Twitter intervention Although the Facebook intervention did not offer students any control over the content of their learning directly, nor was it established as part of the formal learning within a course, it did change the relationship dynamics among the department, students, and the broader community. By supporting students as leaders, far more engagement and discussion emerged on the Facebook site, and classroom teachers working in schools began posting comments and feedback on the site.

Deliberate External Partnerships

The interventions discussed have been asynchronous text- and image-based experiences. Education faculty also wanted to offer students voice-based synchronous opportunities. The format of the third intervention was open but by invitation only. Still working toward the goal of supporting professional lifelong learning and “community around education,” students were invited to participate in virtual conferences using webinar software. For example, in April 2016, the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE) hosted a virtual conference and solicited participation from faculty members and graduate students across Canada. This became the culminating activity for students in the final year of the graduate diploma in educational technology. Although not mandated, students were encouraged to share their applied research projects in short presentations during the virtual conference. They could submit their projects for presentation through the peer review process or simply attend and view the presentations of their classmates and others.

Students were prepared for this event by prior scaffolding activities held within core prerequisite courses. Students were given opportunities to participate in live webinar events restricted to class members in order to help them become familiar with webinar tools and etiquette. In addition, partnerships were established with the University of Manitoba for closed sharing between students enrolled at each institution during a mini-conference. This gave them the opportunity to do a presentation using unfamiliar virtual presentation software as well as to listen to presentations with an unfamiliar audience. Anecdotal evidence from students indicated that the intimate sessions between universities, though initially somewhat intimidating, were subsequently useful in gaining experience and perspective on technology-related issues. Students who went on to present in the open CNIE conference received valuable feedback from peers on research design and evaluation.

2015–16 and the Rise of MIKM 2701, a Mi’kmaw Studies MOOC

Former CBU president Dr. David Wheeler was one of several university presidents promoting provincial support for tuition-free enrolment for all students in postsecondary open education. As a result, the course entitled MIKM 2701: Learning from the Knowledge Keepers was launched in 2014 and presented face-to-face on campus to 13 credit-registered students, being live-streamed during each of the 13 weeks of the course. The live stream was available to anyone to view as a public broadcast on Bell Media’s cable network channel and saved as an archived recording. The videos recorded during this time are still available and hosted by the university through Vimeo, free of charge (https://vimeo.com/album/4376432).

Although the course facilitators and CBU administrators participated in several discussions with xMOOC providers while considering the design and development of MIKM 2701, it was quickly determined that the style of instruction and the business model for resource creation were not suitable in that they were incongruent with the learning experience that facilitators wanted to provide. However, the varied methods of cMOOCs served as exemplars of practice for our efforts in the open.

The design of the course was low-tech, in essence a three-hour conversation once a week that became known as Mi’kmaw Monday. Mi’kmaw knowledge keepers—that is, elder speakers—were invited each week to share what they knew about the various themes of the course. The course was facilitated by two CBU faculty, one of whom was Stephen Augustine, then the dean of Unamaki College. Three types of participation were offered: students could enrol and receive full credit (accounting for 13 face-to-face enrolments), or participants could register to receive a certificate of participation. Alternatively, participants were encouraged to register and come to the face-to-face session or watch it online. To receive a certificate of participation, participants were asked to complete reflective essays on the evening courses and submit them to the course instructors at the end of the course. Interaction in the live sessions was supported in multiple ways.

Face-to-face students could ask questions by coming up to one of two microphones in the room, and distance education students could participate through the concurrent live tweet chat #TALIAQCBU. At the height of the course, the Twitter hashtag trended number one in Canada during the live sessions for multiple weeks. An associated, closed Facebook community was established to support students as well and grew to over 3,000 members. The Facebook community was monitored and facilitated by course instructors, a member of the Marketing Department, and a teaching assistant. The overwhelming public response to the course took the university by surprise. The registration process, via email, caused such heavy traffic on the university network that the email server was flooded and shut down for two days. The management and maintenance of the course became the full-time job not only of the two course facilitators but also of three support staff members located in various departments of the university. The course facilitators were unable to read and respond to all of the direct messages that they received during the course because of the sheer number of people who reached out and wanted to connect directly. Although the course ended in 2016, it has left a lasting legacy. The Facebook group is ongoing, and, though the facilitators rarely engage or post in it, participants regularly share learning and information among themselves. During the subsequent two years, there was discussion on what to do with the videos and whether to reoffer the course using them. To respect the elders and knowledge keepers who shared their experiences, the videos created (three hours in length) would not be edited/remixed without their explicit permission.

Nevertheless, for all its popularity, the course offered proved to be unsustainable. It was incredibly labour intensive, and, despite the number of students opting to take the certificate, it is unlikely that the course covered the cost of its creation. However, cost recovery was not the goal; rather, it was the awareness of Mi’kmaw issues and an opportunity for CBU to engage with the community in open discussion. Again, from available information, there is no direct way to measure or track if the course was successful in increasing access to education. An analysis of themes arising from the participants’ reflections indicates that the course was successful in meeting its goals of supporting awareness of Mi’kmaw history and current issues as well as transforming conversations about Mi’kmaw-non-Indigenous relationships (Augustine, Root, Snow, & Doucette, 2017). The course has been highlighted by Tony Bates in his research on “pockets of innovation,” which arguably has raised the profile of the university. Despite its success, staff and faculty consulted agreed that it could not be done again that way. The course was highly contextual and is not scalable, part of its success being the dynamic between facilitators and participants. It was determined that what worked in this instance could not be packaged and reused to the same effect. Furthermore, doing so was not the spirit of intent of open education at CBU.

2016–17: The Development of a Sustainable Model

When asked about the next steps for open learning, Tanya Bran-Barrett, the dean of research and teaching and learning stated that “out of knowledge keepers we developed the open digital learning opportunities strategy. We call them Little Open Online Courses or LOOCs, in a 3C model—that is credit, certificate or curiosity” (Bran-Barrett, MacDonald, Sakalauskas, & Baker, 2017). The university wanted a greater impact than the micro-interventions outlined in the first pilot, but the resource-intensive second pilot was not sustainable. The goal of the open strategy was to connect local people with people from around the world while aiming for excellent teaching and learning design. A global approach for the campus needed to be developed that built on the best features of both.

Currently, interested faculty can apply to offer a 3C course. The 3C designation represents a course offered for regular credit, with a certificate similar to that established in MIKM2701, and fully open to the public (the curiosity option). Curious students are encouraged to register, but registration is not required for participation. Therefore, it is impossible for CBU to track the number of participants motivated by curiosity. Dedicated software was adopted to allow registration outside the official campus system that centralizes registration and removes this work from course facilitators. Since there is no single design model for the 3C courses, much of the design is left to course instructors to determine. However, there is a basic template for the certificate of participation and for curious students’ participation. All courses are offered in a variation of multimodal learning with synchronous, face-to-face options in many but not all offerings. Credit students participate in the course with the assistance of the learning management system and by attending face-to-face sessions, if they are offered. For some courses, face-to-face sessions are replaced by online synchronous events using web-conferencing software, whereas others are completely asynchronous.

Credit students participate in the manner outlined in the syllabus, as per any regular course offering. However, in addition to the standard LMS engagement, each course has an associated Facebook page. This is the real home for the certificate and curious students, yet students registered for credit can also join the closed Facebook group associated with the course, though it is not a requirement. Courses with a face-to-face component are often live-streamed through Facebook Live directly into the closed group, where certificate and curious students can gain access to the instructor’s lecture. By making access optional for credit students and by explaining the risks of participation to curious and certificate students, all participants can make informed choices for participation, thereby allowing the university to meet privacy and protection requirements. Faculty members are counselled on social media and given help in deciding if they want to use such media with their personal identities or have identities created for this purpose. Although Facebook is not ideal software for learning, it was chosen as the platform because of its accessibility and the ease with which students and faculty members can adopt the technology.

To support the streaming lecture, a permanent broadcast space—designated as the 3C room—was created with a small budget of $10,000. An interactive whiteboard was installed as well as a responsive camera system allowing for the same type of streaming as made possible by Bell Media but with far less labour involved. Since the streaming classroom is dedicated, the equipment does not need to be set up and then removed for each lesson, as was the case for MIKM2701, thus saving about five hours of labour per class. A stage was also developed by adding curtains, lights, an interactive whiteboard, and comfortable chairs. Basic cameras installed in the ceiling allow for several camera angles on the stage. Encoding of video and streaming is done with open access software. All videos recorded are archived and organized in an open library.

The decision not to develop a more specific recipe for 3C-structured courses encouraged faculty members to develop courses that aligned with their objectives, thus recognizing that all courses are highly contextual and need different approaches. However, the structure implemented was intended to create a robust support network for faculty members and students. Centralized supports were established for the former not by creating new positions but by reallocating the roles of staff members already on campus. A staff member from the Department of Communications with a strong background in video production and editing was moved to the teaching and learning centre. The lone distance education administrator was associated with the 3C courses as the first point of contact for all curious and certificate students. Her role is to help the students get connected technically and to liaise with them in order to build a relationship between the student and the university. The educational developer in the teaching and learning centre rounded out the team supporting faculty members in the production of course content and the hosting of live events. An undergraduate student (peer) facilitator hired for each course enables dialogue within the Facebook group and participates in all of the live sessions in order to monitor social media and bring questions forward. All peer facilitators are trained prior to starting work on a course.

Through the refinement of the 3C courses initiated in the fall of 2016, the aim of open education at CBU was achieved. It became clear that relationships were at the heart of operations and that open education was a means to connect with students who would not normally attend the university. In most MOOC models, individuals can either disappear or skyrocket to “fame” through social amplification, but in the LOOC or 3C model learning is a relationship-building experience. Anecdotal evidence shared by the distance education coordinator outlines the diversity of learners—be they senior citizens, housebound, local learners, or distant learners—and shows how enthusiastic and thankful curious and certificate students can be given the opportunity to engage in a learning community in this way. Participants often email the distance education coordinator to tell her about their experiences in the course and what the opportunity to participate has meant to them. In the 10 courses offered as C3 courses since January 2017, the registration numbers are still much lower than those for MIKM2701 (only 1,700 registrants in total compared with over 24,000 participants in one term in MIKM2701), but these courses represent the evolution of a strategy that can now support sustained growth over time.

Analysis of How We Got from There to Here

When I examine each initiative as an activity cycle that took place from 2014 to 2016, I see the evolution of the CBU open learning strategy. CBU moved from singular microlevel interventions to a macrolevel strategy based on the learning that emerged from the delivery of each course, though there was no strategically planned learning. What emerged was a change in the university through relationships, as based on conversations with stakeholders or actors in the system. One of the advantages of a small university is its ability to communicate quickly and to share learning from a variety of perspectives. Although not captured in the description of the interventions, the multiple perspectives—from the technical administrators to the teaching faculty and the financial/administrative leaders—informed one another of the success of the varied projects via formal and informal conversations and consultations so as to arrive at the 3C model. Previous studies have identified both altruistic and strategic motives for the adoption of open modalities (Murphy, 2013; Pena, 2009). Arguably, in this case, the motivation was both to serve students and to lower costs, yet there were well-documented tensions among financial restrictions, faculty time, and student engagement (Crozier, 2018; Murphy, 2013; Olcott, 2012).

With regard to financial restrictions, in all interventions presented in this case study consideration of financial support drove the choice of platform. The most expensive design (MIKM 2701) was supported by a partnership with an external provider, but it added another layer of complexity to the administration. It would not have been possible without the focus on and prioritization of a working policy to support the experiment of large-scale opening. The lack of dedicated policy support followed by funding has been indicated as a major limitation for postsecondary strategic development that necessitates cultural and practical shifts in how the institution organizes teaching and learning (Bossu, Brown, & Bull, 2012; Friesen, 2009).

The case offers evidence of a second key theme that emerged from the literature: the time required for faculty members to develop high-quality materials. The strategy that appears to be the most sustainable in all three cases is recording or capturing live open events, be they text (tweets) or voice/video (webinars or live streams), with some post-event support, for example, in the case of video, a high-quality archived product that can be reused. Essentially, the process adopted by the university supported the faculty member in creating a high-quality OER that was highly contextual as opposed to the reuse of OERs such as the Khan Academy resources, highly generalizable but limited in applicability for the same reason (Rao, Hilton, & Harper, 2017). Through supported C3 course development, the university worked toward sustainable policy by incrementally and strategically building the capacities of faculty members, thereby reducing resistance among tenured faculty members to the “extra work” encountered in development (Crozier, 2018).

The third theme relates to student engagement and the type of relationship that the university and faculty members want to build with students. Here we must return to the prime unit of analysis or the interactions of parts of the system. The primary mediating artifact or technology as outlined by Dron and Anderson (2014) selected for open students was social media as a means to engage the public collaboratively. This had a disruptive effect on the rules of engagement in terms of the decagon of freedom in relation to discourse, disclosure, and relationship formation of learning. In 2014–15, students emerged as leaders of learning; they did so as well in 2015–16 in a different way as exemplified by the longevity of the Facebook community. Changing the rules and the mediating artifacts allowed for the evolution of a new division of labour and for the strategic centralization of some of the university’s resources to support learning. There was also an overall feeling of greater satisfaction among staff and faculty in engaging in open learning.

Evaluating the system’s quantitative measurements of effect size proved to be impossible with the limited data available. Each pilot was conducted separately, over time, without a cohesive strategy. Like many other institutions, CBU does not track online students separately from on-campus students (Bates, 2017). Enrolment and admission services at CBU have little to no recourse in capturing open participants’ experiences or even their identities, unless they choose to share such information.

Conclusion

Although portrayed as a deliberative investigation of a sustainable, open course delivery strategy at CBU, the process was far from strategic. It emerged, much like the learning in cMOOCs themselves, from pockets of innovation and sharing throughout the university and by learning from mistakes. The approach to distance education reflects the university’s approach to education in general in that the driving forces were embedded in community and relationship building. Not only relationships with professional members of the community but also relationships with one another (e.g., student-student, student-faculty, faculty-staff-administration) comprise one of the central strengths of small universities, an area where they can compete with larger, more resource-rich institutions. It might seem to be counterproductive to talk about open education in this context when open education has become synonymous with MOOCs. However, open education is much more than this; it is also about service to one’s community, in our case to the people of Cape Breton Island. Of course, increasing recruitment and promoting one’s institution are considered in the dialogue; open education is not, nor can it be, an entirely selfish act in a university of this size, but determining the scale of open education offerings is an ongoing process and an evolution, from very small to very large to something in between.

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