Page:The battle for open.pdf/54

 and would rather propose it is best viewed as this collection of overlapping principles.

Conclusions

Openness in education has many strands leading to it, and depending on the particular flavour of open education one is considering, some of these will be more prevalent than others. This makes talking about open education as a clearly defined entity or movement problematic, and adopting a single definition is c­ounter-​­productive. Just as open education has many inter-​­related aspects, such as open access, OER, MOOCs and open scholarship, so it is defined by overlapping but distinct influences. In this chapter three such influences, namely open universities, open source and web 2.0 have been proposed, but there will be others, for example, from a ­socio-​­political perspective. Some have detected elements of neo-​­liberalism in the popularity of MOOCs (Hall 2013). It is not the intention of this book to explore these aspects, although such an analysis with regards to open education would be fruitful.

Having looked at the possible motivations for the open approach, and the influencing factors that have led to its current configuration, the different aspects of openness in education can now be considered. The first of these is perhaps the most venerable, that of open access publishing, which is the subject of the next chapter.