The BBC’s picture editor Phil Coomes has a long, excellent feature on the open education photography classes offered by Jonathan Worth and Matt Johnston through Coventry University. The course is open to anyone in the world, via webcast, and runs with up to 35,000 students. The class focuses not just on technique, but on the role of photographers in the 21st century, when everyone has a cameraphone, and when controlling copies of photos on the net is an impossibility.
He uses Creative Commons licenses (CC) for his classes. “I’d always been an avid All Rights Reserved user but it just stopped making sense. The open classes can only work with a CC license, which was a big deal for the university because it turns out education establishment are avid All Rights Reserved users too. Much like me thinking I was just an image maker, the uni thought its product was ‘knowledge’ and their old business model relied on keeping a tight grip on that.
“Well, I knew it wasn’t my product as a teacher. My product is the learning experience and opening the doors online meant that I turned that product into an outward-facing asset.
“In a world where everyone with a smartphone is a potential supplier of image content, I had to work out what I did that was different, and it turns out there’s a whole bunch of stuff both as an artisan and as a mediator and publisher.
“On a personal level I also found out that this stuff has applications in other areas too – education being a case in point, where I realised the real thing of value was not the knowledge but the learning experience. The message of that experience is amplified by opening it up – hence the success of the open classes.”
Worth has shot several portraits of me that are really very, very good, including the one above.
Photography and open education