The battle for open could be conceived as the necessary perturbations that occur during this ‘back loop’. In Chapter 2, it was suggested that it is now a question of which type of openness one wanted, rather than simply open vs. closed. One way of thinking of this is to see it as a number of smaller resilience transitions occurring, where the common theme is an open approach as the cause of the shift. But the overall system (that of education) may still be resilient, in the same way that a number of smaller forest fires may occur but at a national level the forestry retains its resilience. This shift in granularity allows us to observe the significant changes that open education is creating without recourse to the wholesale ‘revolution’ or ‘disruption’ required by the mindset seen in Chapter 7.
Levels of OER Engagement
To illustrate how this approach offers an alternative narrative for open education, let us consider OERs and the different levels of engagement people have with them. Open education in general, and OERs specifically, form a basis from which many other practices benefit, but often practitioners in those areas are unaware of OERs explicitly. It is likely that these secondary and tertiary levels of OER awareness represent a far greater audience than the primary ‘OER-aware’ one, so one can view the sizes of these audiences like the metaphorical iceberg, with increasing size as one goes into these unseen areas. There are three possible areas of OER usage:
Primary OER usage–This group is ‘OER aware’, in that the term itself will have meaning for them; they are engaged with issues around open education; they are aware of open licences and they are often advocates for OERs. This group has often been the focus of OER funding, conferences and research, with the
