Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear, however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within people's lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common, and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear. What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches. Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article, the authors look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. They look at a major initiative undertaken by The Open University (OU) to explore what happens in providing free access to resources and then consider other research-led projects that provide pieces of evidence for the impact that might come with more open approaches. (Contains 6 figures and 47 endnotes.)