Page - 7 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

1 Open and FreeAccess toEducation for All 7 Fig.1.2 Citationnetwork of open education articles plotted.Clusterswithinthiscouldbeidentified,andappropriate labels imposed.The resultingnetwork is shown inFig. 1.2. Fromthisnetwork,eightdistinctareaswithinopeneducationemerged:Distance education,e-learning,openeducation inschools,OER,MOOCs,OpenAccesspub- lishing,Socialmediaandopenpractices.Alloftheseareashaveelementsofopening upaccess toeducational practice as acore motivation or principle. What the network demonstrates is that there is indeed little cross-referencing betweentheseareas.ArticlesonMOOCs,for instance,donot tendtoreferenceones inOER,andviceversa, andneither referenceopenanddistanceeducation research andsoon.Insomeareas,thismightbeunderstandable,forexample,manyarticleson open access publishing are from an information science, librarianship perspective, and similarly the work on social media emerged from a communications focus and evolved into consideration of academic use of such tools. Given the similarity in aims and issues faced by distance education, MOOCs and OERs, the absence of much overlap between them is surprising, however. Perhaps the area of most interest is that of open practices, or open educational practice (OEP), which acts as a bridge or glue between many of the other clusters, locatedasit isat theintersectionofsocialmedia,openaccesspublishingandOER.It