With the success of open access publishing, Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open education practices, the open approach to education has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. This marks a moment of victory for the open education movement, but at the same time the real battle for the direction of openness begins. As with the green movement, openness now has a market value and is subject to new tensions, such as venture capitalists funding MOOC companies. This is a crucial time for determining the future direction of open education. In this volume, Martin Weller examines four key areas that have been central to the developments within open education: open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship. Exploring the tensions within these key arenas, he argues that ownership over the future direction of openness is significant to all of those with an interest in education.

The collection of essays reviews, explores and reports on the state of the digitalized world and a number of communication issues. It is a readable, non-technical publication which offers a comprehensive presentation of communication issues, trends, data, and likely future developments in the digitalized world.

This book is an academic publication about the global development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and major MOOC platforms worldwide in the past decade, as well as the outlook of MOOCs in the future, with an emphasis on Greater China. The book also discusses the upsurge of the demand for online learning and MOOCs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is divided into three main parts - Part I: Overview of MOOCs introduces the origin and history of MOOCs and the development of MOOC platforms in Greater China and the global context; Part II: Key Issues discuss the MOOC policies, innovative pedagogy, technology, and ecosystems worldwide; and Part III: Beyond MOOCs probes into the roles and benefits of MOOCs in times of crises, as well as the outlook of MOOCs in the future. In terms of topic diversity, the book contains a comprehensive investigation of the past and latest MOOC developments, extracting and elaborating on relevant information regarding platforms, policies, pedagogy, technology, and ecosystems. Subsequently, in-depth analyses of MOOC data are utilized to deduce the current trends related to the MOOC movement and to extrapolate the likeliest direction of development for MOOCs in the years to come. The book can inform policymakers, education institutions, course instructors, platform developers, investors, researchers, and individual learners of MOOCs about critical information on the present and future of MOOC development, assisting them in making crucial decisions on what initiatives can optimize their advantages in the sector.

Since the late 1970s, China has initiated landmark reforms in education resulting in great strides in international rankings.. Unlike many recent books on Chinese educational reform, which examine macroscopic policies, this book examines the universalization of pre-school education, school selection in elementary education, attractiveness of vocational education, the operational mode of university charters, the development of open universities, the credit bank system in building the learning society, and other aspects of education, and only analyzes one specific problem in each of these contexts for the purpose of comparing China’s educational reforms to their overseas counterparts through microscopic study.Insights on Education Reform in China is not intended to provide a complete picture of China’s educational reform. Rather, it addresses the types of complicated circumstances under which China has made achievements in educational reform, and the conflicts arising in the context of that reform.Topics covered include: Education Reform, Equality, Standardization, Governance, Learning Society