Baring my SOLE: does informal, self and socially directed open learning make for an inclusive learning environment?

Social Open Learning Ecologies (SOLEs) provide higher education with a useful way to imagine the future of teaching and learning. The prolific use of social media and personal smart technologies by students and teachers (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012) underpin new forms of learner engagement that reflect fundamental changing life habits; changes that create as many problems as opportunities for provided formal education. Appreciation of life-wide learning (Jackson, 2011) and learning ecologies (Barnet, 2011) is growing, as is the exploration of how digital and social media are being used to personalise and open up learning (Megele, 2014). Clara and Barbera (2013) contrast the conceptualisations of community-centred cMOOCs with content-centred xMOOCs, and alternative acronyms for similar disruptive learning environments are abundant: S[ocial]OOCs and T[ruely]OOCs being two. The playing with nomenclature is both indicative of the critique of MOOCs, and massiveness in particular, and the interest amongst educators in formulating a more open view of learning. In this forum session we will consider openness as being the most significant current focus for sustained disruptive innovation. Massive, Online and Course all compound the MOOC phenomenon in terms of provided education; in many ways the antithesis of openness. Openness encapsulates a set of learner-centred ideals including autonomy, free association, self-direction and social mediation: ideas that qualitatively change thinking about engagement with, and the experience of, learning. While openness has many meanings (Anderson, 2013), it can be understood as a dimension of self-determination and of fostering a sense of ‘being’. The forum will discuss intersections between openness and heutagogy; the latter being the study of self-determined learning addressing future capabilities, including that of knowing how to learn and which “emphasise[s] a more holistic development in the learner” (Hase & Kenyon, 2000). The idea of SOLE is offered as a useful framework and basis for self-directed learning networks born out of life-wide habits of using social media, with openness signalling a necessary shift towards autonomous learning, and ecology situating learning as something that is complex and lived. The forum's challenge will be to make use of these ideals to the extent that it is able to address the needs of learners, "especially those who do not have high self-regulation skills, feel lost and without any direction and support" in open learning environments (Clara and Barbera, 2013, p.131). The answer may lie in committing more attention to valuing and developing learning capabilities across physical and online spaces, in parallel to delivered curricula; an inclusive strategy that cuts across more instrumental approaches to developing employability, digital literacy and support for disabled students for example. A learning-centred philosophy in the digital and social age needs to result in an inclusive, life-wide and lifelong strategy. I argue the concept of SOLE contains the necessary bare essentials to allow us, as academic innovators, to progress our thinking about future conceptualisations of learning.