Presented at the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) World Conference for Online Learning in Toronto, Canada, October 2017. This study addresses a gap in the available literature by exploring how discourses around open education have evolved over time. Understanding how individuals conceptualize openness over time can provide insight into the trajectory of the open movement, enable researchers to recognize how stakeholder interest may (or may not) be changing, and allow researchers to understand interest in and motivations of the open education community. We used Twitter posts and user profiles as data sources to identify the focal points of social media discourse around openness. By targeting sixteen hashtags related to open education created from 2009 to 2016, we were able to identify and retrieve 178,304 tweets, profile information from 23,061 users, and associated metadata. We believe this represents the most extensive dataset of historical open education tweets to date. A significant advantage of examining social media posts relative to other sources is that social media aggregates the perspectives of a diverse range of individuals including administrators, faculty, researchers, and so forth. The retrieved data were analyzed using descriptive and qualitative analysis techniques to gain a deeper understanding of the discourse surrounding openness. Our findings show that the diversity of participants contributing to the open discourse has varied somewhat over time. However, this discourse has predominantly revolved around open resources. Despite this, there are signs that an increase in interest around pedagogy, teaching, and learning is emerging, which we believe is an important aspect of openness supporting innovation in education. Via guided discussion questions, we hope to engage participants in critically exploring the dominant discourses within the open movement and examining the reasons as to why an emphasis upon open content continues to be more prominent in the open community than open practices.

1. An analysis of how the Twitter discourse
surrounding open education unfolded from
2009 to 2016
Michael Paskevicius - University of Victoria
George Veletsianos, Ph.D. - Royal Roads University
Royce Kimmons, Ph.D. - Brigham Young University
ICDE World Conference for Online Learning
October 2017
Toronto, Canada

2. Aims
Small awards to
emerging scholars
http://www.thedlrgroup.com/
Research funded by the Canada Research Chairs
program via The Social Media and Digital Learning
Research Group

3. RQ1. How is openness understood on Twitter, and how
has participation frequency changed over time?
RQ2. Do we now see more people and a greater diversity
of people participating than in the past?
RQ3. How has the Twitter discourse on openness changed
over time?

4. Dataset includes
178,304 tweets and
23,061 users tweeting
about openness
between 2009 to
2016

5. Individual accounts coded by country of origin

6. Individual account contributions by gender

7. Individual account contributions by role

8. Organizational account tweets by year and role

9. Broad categories of tweets by year

10. Qualitatively coded topics of tweets per year

11. Discussion and implications
Openness on Twitter is largely discussed in terms of
content
Twitter serves multiple purposes in the community
Concerns around diversity in participation
Social media data as a source for analysis is an emergent
methodological area

12. Explore more:
Paskevicius, M., Veletsianos, G., & Kimmons, R. (in press). Content is King: An
analysis of how the Twitter discourse surrounding open education unfolded from
2009 to 2016. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed
Learning.
Data from this study is available at http://roycekimmons.com/open_datasets and
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
@mpaskevi @veletsianos @roycekimmons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.