Page - 13 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

1 Open and FreeAccess toEducation for All 13 for those in formal education (e.g. Wiley, Levi Hilton III, Ellington, & Hall, 2012), or study of OER provides learners with an opportunity to build up confidence in a subject, leading to participation in formal education (Weller, Jordan, DeVries, & Rolfe, 2015). MOOCs allow free access to whole courses, but often with the possibilitytopurchaseacertificateofcompletion.Thishelpsopeneducationtothose who may not want to enter formal education, or who already have undergraduate qualifications and seek toupdate skillsor engage in leisure learning. Asthemappingexercisehasshownthereis littlecross-fertilisationbetweenthese areas.However,as theworkontheOOFATmodel illustrates,highereducationinsti- tutes are themselves combining these three approaches and more in order to realise open access to education. This is often complex, nuanced and tailored to the needs and context of the particular institution. The evolving nature of what constitutes ‘open education’ has meant that it is now a wide encompassing term, which can be to itsdetriment.Aswehaveseenwithopeneducationalpractice, it isa termlacking a clear definition which makes it difficult to identify benefits, or impacts. However, thediversityofopinionas towhatconstitutesopeneducationcanalsobe framedas a benefit. At the core of each approach is a desire to increase access to some aspect of education. The institutions surveyed in the OOFAT work are viewing these dif- ferentflavoursofopennessassomethingakin toacomponentbox, fromwhich they canselect theelements they requireandcombine these intodifferent configurations which suit their needs. References Agarwal, A. (2016). Where higher education is headed in the 21st century: Unbundling the clock, curriculum and credential. Retrieved from https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit- page/where-higher-education-is-headed-in-the-21st-century-unbundling-the-clock-curriculum- and-credential/. Brennan,J.,King,R.,&Lebeau,Y.(2004).Theroleofuniversitiesinthetransformationofsocieties. CentreforHigherEducationResearchandInformation.http://www.open.ac.uk/cheri/documents/ transf-final-report.pdf. Christensen, G., Steinmetz, A., Alcorn, B., Bennett, A., Woods, D., & Emanuel, E. (2013). The MOOC phenomenon: Who takes massive open online courses and why? SSRN. http://papers. ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2350964. Cormier,D. (2013).Whatdoyoumean…open?http://davecormier.com/edblog/2013/04/12/what- do-you-mean-open/. Coursera. (2013). 10 US State University systems and public institutions join coursera to explore MOOC-based learning and collaboration on campus. Coursera Blog from http://blog.coursera. org/post/51696469860/10-us-state-university-systems-and-public-institutions. CreativeCommons. (2013a). What isOER? http://wiki.creativecommons.org/What_is_OER%3F. Cronin, C., & MacLaren, I. (2018). Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices. Open Praxis, 10(2), 127–143. https://doi.org/10.5944/ openpraxis.10.2.825. Etzkowitz, H., Webster, A., Gebhardt, C., & Terra, B. R. C. (2000). The future of the university and the university of the future: Evolution of ivory tower to entrepreneurial paradigm. Research Policy,29(2), 313–330.