Valuing 'open': the purpose and value of Open Educational Practices for practitioners

In the evolving landscape of higher education in the UK, the arrival of measurement exercises such as the NSS and now the TEF are contributing to an atmosphere of increasing pressure upon institutions to deliver a satisfying student experience and excellent teaching. What excellent teaching is, and whether this necessarily increases satisfaction, remain debatable. In the open education community, Open Educational Resources (OER) and latterly Open Educational Practices (OEP) have been posited as means to enhance teaching quality, as well as widen access to knowledge.
Certainly, strong cases have been made for open access to modifiable resources, and for fostering networked, collaborative pedagogies, but these have not necessarily yet translated into widespread transformation of educational practices. Various authors of open education literature have noted that there is some way to go in terms making open practices mainstream, and have identified or suggested a variety of barriers that may stand in the way. Enthusiasm for OEP may be dampened by perceptions (not necessarily inaccurate) that it creates additional labour, or lacks recognition and reward. Furthermore, there is ambiguity about what 'open' means, given both its polyvalence and the threat of 'discursive capture' by commercial interests.
While I agree that barriers to OEP are significant, it also remains the case that there are educators (widely defined) who share their work and show their processes, who engage with networked communities, who ask students to develop open resources as assessment tasks. Therefore, in this study I propose to approach the concept of OEP from a different angle: this study will focus on practitioners for whom the barriers are surmountable, for whom educating in the open, in some sense, is worth doing, however complex or difficult it may be at times. This investigation therefore seeks to discover what motivates the open educational practitioners - what they regard as the purpose and value of engaging in open practices. Through this investigation I believe it will be possible to gain insights into how such innovative pedagogical practices operate and can be encouraged and fostered, as well as allowing me to develop, test and refine the concept of Open Educational Practices.