Open warfare #eden15

It was good to sit Martin Weller in the hot seat recently, for a forthright discussion about various aspects of openness in education. Martin is well known for his work around digital scholarship and his various research into the use of MOOCs and other open education approaches at the British Open University. I caught up with him in Barcelona at the 2015 summer EDEN Conference, where he had just given a keynote speech entitled 'The Battle for Open.' I originally interviewed him via text for this blog post ahead of conference, so many were already aware of what he would be saying. Subsequently, I also posted a live blog of his speech as he stepped off the stage at the event. The video of his keynote will be made available soon on this site, but below is some additional content in the form of the video interview.

The key premise of Martin's presentation was that although openness is now more mainstream and accepted in education than it was previously, there are still small battles to decide the direction and development of openness in the coming years. I asked him about the future of MOOCs and other open courses, and we also discussed the concept of open scholarship. These, and several other related topics made this encounter into what I hope you will agree, is an engaging and thought provoking interview about the importance of open education, and the critical role open content, open courses and open scholarship will play in shaping the future.


Video produced by the European Distance and Elearning Network


Open warfare by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.