2025/09/02 by Deimann, Markus
#Higher Education #Imaginaries #Open Education
paper · doi:10.11576/dilema-7563
Openness in education is a concept gaining traction in higher education worldwide. Prominent manifestations include Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Educational Practices (OEP), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and open-source learning management systems (LMS). Governments, organizations, and universities present these as powerful tools to solve pressing problems in education systems. In this essay, I posit that Open Education can be conceptualized as an educational imaginary, a societal vision for the future where technology and education are of significance (Jasanoff Kim, 2015; Rahm, 2023). Using this heuristic lens, I illustrate three imaginaries of openness to demonstrate why implementations of Open Education might fall short of expectations due to conflicting visions of openness. This essay is not intended to be exhaustive regarding current developments in the field of OER.