Open Education: A Study in Disruption [Hardcover]

What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a geographic location, financial status, or ability to access conventional institutions of learning.

But does open education really offer the openness, democracy and cost-effectiveness its supporters promise? Or will it lead to a two-tier system, where those who cant afford to attend a traditional university will have to make do with online, second-rate alternatives?

Open Education engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) but also TED Talks, Wikiversity along with self-organised pirate libraries and free universities associated with the anti-austerity protests and the global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century.

Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Co-founder, Mute, and Mute collective member.

Gary Hall is Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, UK, and visiting professor at the Hybrid Publishing LabLeuphana Inkubator, Leuphana University, Germany. He is also co-founder (in 1999) of the open access journal Culture Machine, a pioneer of OA in the humanities, and co-founder (in 2006) of Open Humanities Press, which was the first open access publisher explicitly dedicated to critical and cultural theory. He is the author and editor of several books on digital culture and the idea of the university, the best known of which is Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (2008).

Ted Byfield is a New Yorkbased independent researcher and writer. He served for over a decade on the design faculty of the New School University, and is l$