Diversity

Thorp and Goldstein note: “Addressing complex problems requires diverse points of view, a deep level of practical implementation and openness to fundamental change.”  Open resources contribute to diversity in that they are created in smaller pieces than entire courses and may be compiled in multiple ways allowing an individual to create their own understanding, interpretation, and mediation of ideas.  The creation of diverse ideas is critical, Irish language poet Nuala ni Dhomnaill in the New York Times Book Review argued that linguistic diversity (and its resulting diversity of thought) is as important as bio-diversity (1995).   Similarly, T. S. Eliot argued that the very way in which pieces of knowledge are placed together create entirely different educations.  As he notes in his essay “The Perfect Critic”: “ the true generalization is not something superposed upon an accumulation of perceptions; the perceptions do not, in a really appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as structure” (Eliot 1920).  

Diversity must be by culture, as culture defines the background an individual learner brings with them that they can apply to the intellectual material.  Diversity must also be by intellectual ideals, philosophies, ideologies, social class, aesthetic taste; in short, the diversity must make the university what it claims to be—a place where ideas can come together freely.  If a university is to teach civil and thoughtful discourse, it must model it.

The organizational architecture of an open university finds ways :to leverage the disparate knowledge assets of people who see the world quite differently and use tools and methods foreign to those we’re familiar with” (Chesbrough).  It is in this way that intellectual diversity is achieved.