Open education has traditionally been tied to ideas of growth and scaling up: reaching wider audiences, extending beyond courses, increasing access to content and ideas. Referring to online platforms, however, Donovan (2021) noted that where growth is associated with openness that it can become vulnerable to exploitation. Might the same be true for open education? Moreover, in its most recent strategic plan, Creative Commons (2020) identified a shift in focus from more sharing to better sharing as its open access path. Is a similar shift in focus required within the field of open education?

Using the Situational Analysis methodology-methods package (Clarke, Friese & Washburn, 2017) I explored notions of scale among open educators through a qualitative online survey, collaborative mapping activity and focus groups, I explore ideas and approaches to scale within open education. Through this exploration I found much ambivalence with respect to issues of growth and scale. Digging deeper, I found that the words “growth” and “scale” were often being used to describe very different approaches to open education: one tied closely to ideas of economics and achieving efficiencies and another was much more organic in nature. It struck me that these approaches aligned closely to what Ursula Franklin (1999) described as “holistic and prescriptive technologies,” from which emerge two very different approaches to control and agency.

In this presentation, I will introduce Franklin’s technological framework and share some of the maps developed as part of much research. I will share some of the early maps from my research and invite participants to add, move, delete and interrogate the “situation of open education” as currently presented in them. I will then engage participants in a discussion with respect to various approaches to growth and scale, focusing specifically on the ways in which they impact student (and teacher) agency.