So it is with openness – we shouldn’t view this as an opportunity missed or romanticise some brief period when there was a brief openness Camelot, now despoiled. The general direction is positive, but with this comes increased complexity. The second lesson highlights this: we replace open vs. closed with a set of more complex, nuanced debates, which may seem rather specialised. For example:
- different approaches to MOOC pedagogy, so called xMOOCs vs. cMOOCs (we will address these in chapter 5)
- different licences, such as the more open Creative Commons CC-BY licence vs. the CC-NC one which restricts commercial use
- different routes to open access, the Gold vs. Green debate
- different technology options, for example centralised MOOC platforms vs. a distributed mix of third-party services
It is from these smaller debates that the larger picture is formed, and it is the construction of this larger picture that the remainder of this book will seek to perform.
Conclusions
The nature of the victory of openness and subsequent struggle can be illustrated with an example where the battle around openness is perhaps most advanced, namely, open access publishing. This is explored in more detail in Chapter 3, but a shortened version here can be used to illustrate the broader argument of this chapter.
The conventional model of academic publishing has usually seen academics providing, reviewing and often editing papers for free, which are published by commercial publishers and access to
