What’s in a name? Wrestling with ‘ODDE’

Abstract

JODDE, the Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital Education, is a new and welcome addition to scholarship linked to open and distance learning (ODL). However, the title of the journal should give pause to just what open, distance, and digital education is and stands for. This invited piece critiques ODDE as a concept, in the context of the multiple terms now used to describe models of education. A gradual, haphazard evolution of terminology brought about by innovation fueled by technology is taking shared meaning to a breaking point. Conversations around educational practices are becoming muddled, to the extent that discourse is becoming ambiguous. ODDE becomes an additional term among this already confusing landscape, and while it might serve as an extension to ODL its founding premise of representing forms of teaching and learning considered ‘non-traditional’ mediated by technologies may already be unnecessary. This article explores the importance of shared terminology, the challenges to ODDE as a term, and the difficulties already facing ODL in the contemporary landscape of practice. Though ODDE is arguably as apt as any alternative for extending the traditional scholarship of open and distance education, a reframing of ‘open’ and ‘distance’ might be preferable. ‘Open’, it is suggested, might be better unpacked to provide a more definite sense of what it promotes; the terms available, inclusive, scalable and sustainable are offered. ‘Distance’ might be replaced as a term with ‘designed,’ which is inclusive of multiple methodologies of education practice now in place. The term ‘designed’ invites the question, how? Linked with ‘open,’ ‘designed’ provides a means of analysis and objective. In a field where diverse models of education are defined using the same term, and similar models are defined using very different terms, adding a further term (ODDE) into the mix seems disingenuous.