How openness impacts on higher education

Abstract

The concept of openness is usually discussed in relation to technological developments that facilitated its emergence (Peter and Deimann, 2013), in particular, the rise of digital technology and the Internet, which are changing the nature of information by making it more accessible to anyone and making it more ‘responsive’, allowing information to be enhanced or degraded by anyone (Peter and Deimann, 2013). Openness is being also driven by the fundamental philosophical claim that knowledge should be considered a common good and be accessible as openly as possible. In the context of high costs of education and the need to make education more accessible and aff ordable, it has been argued that, if education is paid for by the public, then research and content produced with those public funds should be publicly available (Wiley, Green, and Soares, 2012).