Quote:
Originally Posted by avantman42
The Open University (OU) say that:
It's "open" in the sense of being open to anyone with the academic ability to complete a degree. OU courses are distance courses, done during the student's spare time. All that said, they do make plenty of material available for free. Way back when, before the web, the BBC would broadcast OU programmes (they may still do), and anyone was free to watch them.
Also, the term "open" doesn't necessarily mean free of charge. In most contexts where I've seen it used, it's meant that the user can access the contents and modify them if they wish. In ebook terms, I'd consider a non-DRM'd ePub file to be "open", since I can easily look at and modify the files contained within it. |
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The Open University is an extremely well-known organisation in the UK, offering "distance learning" university-level courses. The "Open" part of the name refers to the fact that anyone can become a student with them; there are no entry requirements. I've studied with the OU on and off for decades.
|
Thanks for the information, gentlemen.
Not to be argumentative, but just to offer some things for your consideration . . . .
I notice that both of you are in (and probably from) the U.K. I'm wondering if the word has a different shade of meaning/connotation there. Of course, I know both of you probably access a lot of U.S. websites, but I would think that most of them are U.K. websites. And that is where you would learn (from context, etc.) the meaning of the word.
I just did a quick search for "open textbooks." Here's a quote from the first hit that caught my eye, for a webpage from the California State University: "What are open textbooks? Open textbooks are typically authored by faculty and published on the web with the support of universities or new commercial companies.
This new business model enables free online access to textbooks." (
http://als.csuprojects.org/free-etextbooks) (emphasis mine, G.). The point is, I think that I could go up and down the search hits and find that all of the websites, with the exception of Open University and OpenLearn (ha), if they said anything at all about the subject, would say similar things.
I lack the time, and, frankly, the initiative, too, to do full research on the question. There's probably a specialized dictionary somewhere on the Internet which would give a definitive answer. But, offhand, I don't know where I would find it.
Let me add that even though I have a certain opinion about the word, I am open-minded about the issue (pun intended).