Excellent post, which I had been looking forward to and finally had a chance to read in depth. Thank you for doing all this research and sharing it with the rest of us.

I am not quite seeing your point, though, about a move towards focusing on the creator in ideas about openness in education (before your discussion of OU). The example from Wiley and Green, with the three influences on openness in education, doesn’t, to me, focus on the creator as much as seems to be suggested here.

OER could be focused on the creators mostly, of course, if the creators just put out there stuff that they’re already using for themselves and aren’t too worried about whether it’s usable to others. But the best way to approach OER is to find ways to ensure that the works are as effective from the users’ perspective as possible, such as eliminating technological or licensing barriers to revision/remixing.

Open Access could be thought of as creators just putting their work out there for anyone to pick up or not, but in my experience, a good deal of the motivation behind people doing that is for others to actually be able to access the research (especially when the public has already paid for a good deal of it). Many researchers already have access to each others’ work; mostly what’s needed is broader access. And there are discussions in the OA community about being more open than just allowing “access”–ensuring that licenses allow for not only viewing, but also remixing.

Open education in terms of just putting course materials on the web may not, I agree, be much more than just the creators being “open” and not worrying too much about the users’ experience.

Finally, Wiley’s quote about open being a matter of cost and copyright seems to me to be focused quite a bit on the user: their ability to access the work in terms of money as well as their freedom to do various things with it in terms of licensing.

I feel I may be missing something important here, perhaps misunderstanding your point about the creator focus, since to me it seems the user is just as much a focus in many of these discussions (though not all).

I do agree that some of the meanings of open from Newbould, such as interactivity and transparency, seem more user-oriented. Those are good.