A Student's Guide to Open Learning

Traditional education often puts students in the passenger seat. Like a bus. They drive you wherever they want. Someone else decides the route. You just sit there. You have zero control over what you're taught.
But with open learning, you're in the driving seat. You choose the direction and destination. You can select courses, mix-and-match modules, and build a curriculum that actually fits your needs. You can spend more time on subjects that interest you and less on areas you're already familiar with.

My journey with Open Learning

The year COVID happened was the year I graduated high school.
I was supposed to go to university in 2020. But like everyone else, I ended up stuck at home.
COVID was devastating in so many ways. But something shifted in education. Universities everywhere started putting their materials online, and sometimes they made them open. Free for anyone to access.
I was in Iran. I normally couldn't access Ivy League lectures or workshops from tech giants like Google or Microsoft. But suddenly, I could. I took over 200 online courses.
Nobody assigned me any of it. No institution. No employer. Nobody. For the first time, I could choose. Every single course I took, I chose it myself, based on what I wanted to understand. Not what someone else told me to learn.
I didn't know I was "doing open learning." I just knew I needed more.

What the book actually argues

Openness and closure are two opposite ends of a path.
Closed learning is the system most of us grew up inside. A fixed curriculum. Predetermined outcomes. You learn what the institution decides is worth knowing, at the pace it decides, assessed by its criteria. The institution is at the centre. You are on the receiving end.

"Closed philosophies do not encourage questioning approaches. This can limit creativity and allow bad practice to continue unchallenged."
— Moya Davis, p.9

Open learning inverts this. It starts from your needs, your experience, your questions. The learner is at the centre.

"An open philosophy of learning allows you to study what you wish, when, where and how you wish."
— Moya Davis, p.9

What I found most useful

The most practical sections are on personal profiling and goal-setting.
Davis argues that before you decide what to learn, you need to understand who you are as a learner: what you already know, how you learn best, what genuinely motivates you.

"Personal profiling is a process in which you systematically review every aspect of your life, noting down aptitudes, skills and achievements to build up a rounded picture of the person you really are."
— Moya Davis, p.18

She then introduces a goal-setting structure I now use in my own work. Every goal needs a clear statement, a timescale, and specific criteria that define success. Not "I want to learn more about economics." But "I want to understand the basics of game theory well enough to explain the prisoner's dilemma to someone in five minutes, by the end of the month, by working through two resources."

"Always set relatively small goals with shortish timescales, and aim to have only two to four in hand at any one time."
— Moya Davis, p.31

There's also a chapter on reflective practice and diary-keeping that I think is genuinely transformative if you take it seriously. The idea is simple: you can't evaluate your growth if you don't record it. A reflective log, not a journal of feelings but a log of observations about your learning, becomes evidence of your own intellectual evolution over time.

Who should read this

Anyone who is self-taught, or wants to be. Anyone who has ever felt like the formal education system wasn't built for the way their brain works. Anyone who has a stack of certificates and no clean way to explain them.
And anyone who has been so conditioned by closed learning that the idea of designing their own education feels overwhelming rather than liberating, which is most of us.
The book is from 1993 and the technology references show it. But the logic holds completely. If anything, the argument for open learning is stronger now than it was then, given what's available to self-directed learners today.
I read this in one sitting. It's 76 pages, accessible, direct, and wastes nothing. But some chapters, especially on evaluation and reflective practice, feel cut short just when they get interesting.

A note on my own experience

I discuss this book in my podcast episode The Most Powerful Idea Nobody Talks About: Open Learning and How It Changed My Life, where I use my own story as a case study in what open learning actually looks like across a decade of self-directed study. If you want the personal context alongside the framework, start there.
Listen to the episode here.