The Victory of Openness
Martin Weller
Chapter from the book: Weller, M. 2014. Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory.
Part of
Chapter from the book: Weller, M. 2014. Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory.
Openness is everywhere in education at the moment: in late 2011 a free course in artificial intelligence had over 160,000 learners enrolled (Leckart 2012); in 2012 in the UK the Government followed other national bodies in the US and Canada by announcing a policy mandating that all articles resulting from publicly funded research should be made freely available in open access publications (Finch Group 2012); downloads from Apple’s iTunes U site, which gives away free educational content, passed 1 billion in 2013 (Robertson 2013); British Columbia announced a policy in 2012 to provide open, free textbooks for the 40 most popular courses (Gilmore 2012); the G8 leaders signed a treaty on open data in June 2013, stating that all government data will be released openly by default (UK Cabinet Office 2013). Outside of these headline figures there are fundamental shifts in practices: academics are creating and releasing their own content using tools such as Slideshare and YouTube; researchers are releasing results earlier and using open, crowdsourcing approaches; every day millions of people make use of free, open online tools and resources to learn and share.
Weller, M. 2014. The Victory of Openness. In: Weller, M, Battle for Open. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bam.a
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Published on Nov. 28, 2014