Page - 6 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

6 M. Weller This posits open pedagogy as a function of OER, but the concepts and practices associatedwithopenpedagogyhavea longerhistory thanOER.PeterandDeimann (2013) highlight open education practices stretching back to the Middle Ages with thefoundingofuniversitieswhich‘containedinthemtheideaofopenness,albeitby nomeanscomprehensive.Thisperiodhighlights ‘open’as learnerdriven, restingon a growing curiosity and increasing awareness of educational opportunities’ (p. 9). Any phrasing of open access education that highlights one form of open education, necessarily does soat the expense of another. There is then a strong tendency to be self-referential in each of the strands men- tioned,with little reference toother formsofopeneducation.Apreliminarysystem- aticsearch(Rolfe,2016)for‘openeducation’acrossanumberofdatabases,retrieved over two hundred articles and revealed that there was an initial peak in the period 1970–74,witharticlesrelatingtothefoundingoftheOUandsimilarapproaches.The nextsignificantpeakinpublicationsisfoundin2010–15asMOOCs,opentextbooks and OER gain traction (Fig.1.1). Using a citation analysis method, the landscape of research in open education could be constructed (Weller, Jordan, DeVries, & Rolfe, 2018). This method pro- ceededbygaininganinitialsampleof20documentsonthebasisofliteraturedatabase searches for items which referred specifically the history or definition of openness [(‘open education’, ‘open learning’, openness) AND (history, definition)]. The ref- erences of these articles were then extracted, and the papers which were cited by at least twoof theoriginal sample itemswere thenaddedto thesample to include their references in thenext iteration.Althoughthisprocesscouldberepeatedindefinitely, four iterationswerecarriedoutasmeaningfulclustershademergedat thispoint.At this point, the network included 5,217 references from a total of 172 publications. Using the social network analysis tool Gephi, a network of citations could then be Fig.1.1 Frequency of published articleson open education over time