Advance HE (Higher Education Academy)
International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE)
Commonwealth of Learning
Open Education Global
Association for Learning Technology (ALT)
Professor of Educational Technology; earlier Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence; VLE Director; Director, OER Hub; Academic Director, Learning Design, Open University (UK)
Emeritus Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University (UK). Joined OU in 1995 as a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence; chaired the OU’s first major online/e‑learning course (T171/“You, Your Computer and the Net”) in 1999 with ~15,000 students and served as the OU’s first VLE Director, recommending adoption of Moodle. Directed the Open Education Research Hub and the Global OER Graduate Network (GO‑GN). Research focuses on open education, open educational resources, digital scholarship, and how new technologies shape academic practice. Author of The Digital Scholar (2011), The Battle for Open (2014), 25 Years of Ed Tech (2020), and Metaphors of Ed Tech (2022). Writes at blog.edtechie.net and hosts the Metaphors of Ed Tech podcast.
A model of scholarly practice characterized by open, networked, participatory engagement across the research–teaching–service spectrum using blogs, social media, and open platforms. Emphasizes public‑facing work, rapid peer interaction, remix, and alternative impact measures.
Education for Information • Journal
Uses cases from the UK Open Textbooks project to examine how open textbooks can operationalize open science pedagogy. Identifies drivers (cost, flexibility), barriers (awareness, alignment, time), and enablers (institutional support, communities), and argues that open textbooks can scaffold broader adoption of open educational practices.
Distance Education • Journal
Reports findings on how open textbooks support open educational practices, including adaptation, co‑creation with students, and localized course redesign. The study maps concrete benefits and constraints and offers guidance for institutions seeking to integrate open textbooks within curriculum and professional development.
Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) • Journal
Survey and factor‑analytic study of academics’ professional use of social networking sites. Identifies benefits (visibility, networking), costs (time, distraction), and tensions (personal–professional boundaries, platform control). Offers implications for institutional policy and support of digital scholarship.
Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) • Journal
Positions openness as both a hard‑won achievement and the start of a new struggle over its meaning and control. Drawing lessons from social movements, Weller outlines threats (e.g., enclosure, commercialization) and argues for protecting the educational and societal value of openness through policy, practice, and advocacy.
Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) • Journal
Argues that openness and creativity reinforce one another in networked scholarship. Introduces the notion of the ‘open scholar’ and explains how open educational resources and open practices can catalyze creative production, remixing, and feedback loops that, in turn, strengthen openness as a scholarly method.
Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education (Springer) • Chapter
Traces 25 years of digital education and its intersections with open education. Through five exemplar technologies—the web, LMS, blogs, social media, and MOOCs—the chapter surfaces themes of control vs. ease of use and shows how open education both shapes and is shaped by these technologies, yielding a multifaceted picture of the digital‑open nexus.
Athabasca University Press • Book
Presents metaphors as cognitive tools to think with about educational technology, using varied analogies to examine how technologies are imagined, adopted, and critiqued in education. The book aims to expand educators’ imaginative repertoire, moving beyond purely pragmatic frames to more reflective and critical uses of technology.
Athabasca University Press (Issues in Distance Education) • Book
A historical, critical survey of educational technologies from 1994–2018, with each chapter focusing on a technology or concept (e.g., LMS, blogs, OER, MOOCs, learning analytics). The book highlights recurring cycles of hype and disillusionment, urges evidence‑informed adoption, and foregrounds the social and political contexts shaping technology in higher education.
Radical Solutions and Open Science (Springer) • Chapter
Discusses open education as a strategy to expand equitable access, surveying policy levers, open licensing, and institutional practices. Highlights the role of OER, open textbooks, and open pedagogy in reducing cost barriers and enabling new learning designs, while noting challenges around sustainability and quality.
EDUCAUSE Review • Journal
Reflective overview marking two decades of educational technology developments, highlighting patterns of recurring ideas and the importance of historically informed, critical adoption in higher education.
Ubiquity Press • Book
Explores how open approaches—open access, OER, MOOCs, and open scholarship—moved into the mainstream and why their success introduces new tensions. Weller argues that as openness gains market value, struggles over direction and ownership intensify. The book synthesizes history, benefits, and risks to chart strategic paths for sustaining openness aligned with public values.
Bloomsbury Academic • Book
Book-length analysis arguing that networked digital technologies are reshaping scholarly practice across discovery, analysis, dissemination, and engagement. Weller outlines how openness, blogging, social media, and new metrics alter incentives and enable participatory, public scholarship, while also discussing tensions with existing tenure and reward systems and the need for critical approaches to technology adoption.