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The Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why it Doesn't Feel Like Victory

by Martin Weller

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With the success of open access publishing, Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open education practices, the open approach to education has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. This marks a moment of victory for the open education movement, but at the same time the real battle for the direction of openness begins. As with the green movement, openness now has a market value and is subject to new tensions, such as venture capitalists funding MOOC companies. This is a crucial time for determining the future direction of open education. In this volume, Martin Weller examines four key areas that have been central to the developments within open education: open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship. Exploring the tensions within these key arenas, he argues that ownership over the future direction of openness is significant to all of those with an interest in education.… (more)
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I read the ebook version, which doesn't appear to have a record here. ( )
  ssperson | Apr 3, 2021 |
As an unrepentant MOOC addict and advocate of openness in the cultural heritage universe, this insider's view of openness in higher education was very interesting to me. Weller works for the Open University in the UK, which has had a long history of widening participation in education and of supporting its learners, so it is intriguing to see his take on where we are now in terms of increasing access to educational resources and to scholarly works of various kinds.

"There seems to be a clear trend that the majority of users of open education material are those who are experienced learners already." "...learners tended to be young, white, educated employed males." These findings are interesting to me: the people most likely to access free online learning opportunity already have a certain level of education and of employment. This raises important questions about what the point of these resources is, which Weller goes into in this book.

The book argues that we are at a turning point in the way that people access materials and their education. It analyses the development of Open Access publishing, MOOCs and Open Educational Resources, and open scholarship in general, with an assessment of the current state of play in all these areas. It is an accessible, well-written exploration of important issues.

It seems to me that there is a huge disconnect between the current management structure of universities, which are increasingly run as major business corporations (usually by accountants), and the desire of many of the people working within those institutions to share their work with others and advance research in their fields. It's certainly an interesting area to watch (particularly from the outside!). I definitely see more of a future for the kind of 'guerilla research' that Weller describes: perhaps with funding being directed to such researchers without the involvement of the university at all. Research without managerial interference? Now there's a radical idea. ( )
  AJBraithwaite | Aug 14, 2017 |
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With the success of open access publishing, Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open education practices, the open approach to education has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. This marks a moment of victory for the open education movement, but at the same time the real battle for the direction of openness begins. As with the green movement, openness now has a market value and is subject to new tensions, such as venture capitalists funding MOOC companies. This is a crucial time for determining the future direction of open education. In this volume, Martin Weller examines four key areas that have been central to the developments within open education: open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship. Exploring the tensions within these key arenas, he argues that ownership over the future direction of openness is significant to all of those with an interest in education.

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