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This paper critiques the rise and impact of the open education movement, focusing in particular on Higher Education. It considers the impact of adopting more open practices on learning, teaching and research. In terms of the impact on learning it describes three aspects: Open Educational Resources, e-textbooks and Massive Open Online Courses. In terms of the impact on teaching it describes three frameworks which can guide the design process: the 7Cs of Learning Design framework, the SAMR model and the ICAP framework. Finally, it considers the impact on research. The paper concludes by considering the barriers and enablers associated with adopting more open practices.

This paper explores the influence of the concept of interdisciplinarity on the work of educational technologists and others involved in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) research. There is a growing recognition of the need for interdisciplinarity in solving complex research problems in many areas of science. Technology-enhanced learning is a relatively young area of research adopting a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the use of technologies for learning. This makes it a field that is worthy of exploration in terms of how the ways of working developed by its practitioners inform our understanding of the challenges of the field as well as its benefits. This paper reporting on work commissioned by the Joint Research Councils' programme on Technology Enhanced Learning provides a discussion of the growing literature on this topic, and a study of the working practices of academics in TEL research. An interview study of 18 participants was conducted as part of the project. The paper reports on the key findings from the interviews and concludes with some practical suggestions to help participants deal with the challenges posed by interdisciplinary working in TEL research. [Note: The article number (12) shown on this PDF is incorrect. The correct citation is Article 11.]

By investigating how educational practitioners participate in activities around open educational practices (OEP), this paper aims at contributing to an understanding of open practices and how these practitioners learn to use OEP. Our research is guided by the following hypothesis: Different social configurations support a variety of social learning activities. The social configuration of OEPs is investigated by an operationalization into the dimensions (1) practice, (2) domain, (3) collective identity, and (4) organization. The results show how practitioners of six different OEPs learn, while acting and collaborating through a combination of offline and online networks. The findings of our study lead to practical implications on how to support participation in OEP, and thereby stimulate learning in (online) networks of OEP.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have expanded significantly in recent years and are challenging traditional educational fee-paying offerings. The advantages of MOOCs are cited as the fact that they are free, that they enable participants to be part of a global community of peers and to have the experience of learning through social media and that they offer the potential for opening up educational and facilitating social inclusion. Nonetheless there are challenges associated with MOOCs. Firstly, most have very high dropout rates. Secondly, there are challenges with approaches to recognition of learning and issues with learner authentication and cheating. Thirdly, there are issues with providing support at scale. This paper argues that effective design of MOOCs is key. It focuses on the description of a 12-dimensional classification schema for describing and designing MOOCs. It then uses the schema to describe five MOOCs, which are respectively based on associative, cognitive, constructivist, situative and connectivist pedagogies. It then describes the 7Cs of Learning Design framework and discusses how it can be used to design MOOCs.

Cloudworks (Cloudworks.ac.uk) is a social networking site designed for sharing, finding and discussing learning and teaching ideas and experiences. Design and development of the site has been based on an iterative analysis, development and implementation approach, underpinned by ongoing research and evaluation. To this end, we have been seeking to establish strategies to enable us to systematically position transactions and emerging patterns of activity on the site so that we can more reliably use the empirical evidence we have gathered. In this article we will introduce a framework we have developed for observing and supporting community development on the site. In building our framework we have used empirical evidence gathered from the site, then related it to the literature from a range of disciplines concerned with professional and learning communities. We link research relating to distance learning communities with studies into Computer Mediated Communication, self-organising communities on the web, and wider research about the nature of learning organisations and continuous professional development. We argue that this framework can be used to capture the development of productive communities in the space (i.e. how far cohesive, productive groups can be said to be emerging or not) and also help focus future development of the platform, and provide guidelines for community support.