Open Education can encompass a wide variety of practices, from pedagogy to the openly licenced teaching materials that can be created or adapted. Below are a number of the kinds of Open Education practices and resources that you might come across, or consider working on yourself!
Open Licences
Open licenses allow people to use, share, and build on creative works with few or no restrictions. This means they do not need to ask the original creator for permission, but they usually must give credit to the creator. The most well-known type of open license is the Creative Commons (CC) license, which has six different versions. These range from very permissive to more restrictive, allowing authors to keep ownership while also defining how their work can be used.
Open licenses are popular for software (like open-source licenses such as MIT or GPL), educational resources (OER), and digital content like images and reports. They encourage collaboration and innovation and are the foundation of the open movement, which helps platforms like Wikipedia and its related projects succeed.
CC Licences Explained
Open licenses operate in three main ways:
- Granting Permission: Unlike traditional copyright, which reserves “all rights,” an open license specifies the rights granted to the public.
- Setting Conditions: Users must follow the rules of the license. This often includes giving credit to the original creator for their work.
- Retaining Rights: The creator keeps copyright ownership while allowing others to use their creation more freely.
The Power of Open Licences
Open Source Licenses are specific to software code and allow users to use, modify, and share the source code. These licenses can be divided into two types of licence. Permissive Licenses, such as the MIT License and Apache License 2.0 are the least restrictive and give users the most freedom to integrate the code into their own projects (including commercial projects). Copyleft Licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), require that any new works made from the original software must also be open-sourced under the same terms.
Open licenses are the basis of and the success behind Open Education. They help create a collaborative environment that benefits everyone involved. Read more about using the correct CC licence on CCCOER.
Open Education Resources (OER)
Open Education Resources or OER are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. OER come with 5R permissions, including the permission to:
- Retain – the right to create, own, and control copies of the content;
- Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways;
- Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself;
- Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new;
- Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others.
OER Explained
OER can include textbooks, instructional materials, interactive simulations, lesson plans, full courses, and even complete degrees (often called Z-Degrees). A popular example of OER is open textbooks that are funded, published and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books can be downloaded for no cost or printed at low cost, offering significant savings compared to expensive proprietary textbooks. OER provide academic freedom to customize, localize, translate, and update as required. OER expand and enhance the academic offering of an institution. OERs are typically stored and distributed through websites, platforms or repositories that provide search, view and download capabilities.
Discuss “Why OER matters” on OEGlobal Connect. To learn about Open Education Resources, read the linked articles compiled by the CCCOER team.
Find OERs here:
- Browse the wealth of OERs submitted to the OEWeek Library
- Explore the winners of the Open Education Awards for Excellence
- Journey through the OER World Map
- Sift through the collection on OER Commons
- If you are looking for topic-specific resources, peruse the Pressbooks Directory
- View MIT’s famed Open Learning digital collection of OpenCourseWare
Open Textbooks
Open textbooks are similar to traditional educational books, designed to teach a specific subject. What makes Open Textbooks special is that they are created by authors and publishers who, by licensing them with Creative Commons licences, allow everyone to use and change them for free, anywhere and anytime. Users can download these books, edit them, and share them without any cost. Open textbooks help students save a lot of money on their education.
Where can you find Open Textbooks?
Here are just a few places to start:
- Open Textbooks on OER Commons
- The Open Textbook Library
- OpenStax
- Open Library
- University of Cape Town Libraries
- Open Textbooks from Siyavula for Senior / Secondary schools across Africa
- View the textbooks in the Pressbooks Directory.
- Check out other platforms with CCCOER
Open Textbooks Explained
Open Practices
Open Education is different from traditional education in meaningful ways. It involves new methods and cultural practices that emphasize sharing and working together. This includes collaboratively creating content, finding and reusing existing (open) resources, and modifying educational materials to fit local needs through translation and adaptation.
Open Education also emphasises giving credit to original authors and utilizing teaching methods that encourage participants to produce work that benefits the public. These modern open practices represent a change in the education system, which requires new policies and different approaches to providing education. For this to be successful, support from government leaders and senior figures in education institutions is essential.
Learn more about Open Practices:
- Excellent OEAward-winning Open Practices in Action
- Open Pedagogy
- Case Studies from CCCOER members
- Discuss “What is Open Pedagogy?” on OEGlobal Connect.
Other Areas of Open Education
There are as many examples of open education in action as there are of education in action! Below are some of the more well known areas and you can also explore these excellent resources:
- The CCCOER team explores What is Open Education?
- Browse Helpful Resources for Open Education
- Read The Year Of Open archive to learn more about the Open movement and its impact on education.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are aimed at unlimited participation via the web. MOOCs can include traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, and may include interactive elements such as user forums to support discussion and dialogue and quizzes with automated feedback.
Open Education MOOCs openly license the course content, structure and learning goals, to promote the reuse and remixing of resources. MOOCs that use closed licenses for course materials while maintaining free access for students have reduced Open Education benefits. While MOOCs typically support free and open enrollment, participants wanting a credential such as a certificate usually must complete all course requirements and pay a fee. MOOCs are frequently used as a means of marketing, profiling world-class professors and the unique programmatic offerings of an institution. Review these OEAward-winning MOOCs.
Open Access (OA)
In addition to teaching and learning materials, Open Education includes research outputs. Open Access (OA) refers to research published in a way that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OA removes price barriers such as subscriptions and pay-per-view fees, giving researchers, students, and the public access to research. As most research is publicly funded, OA ensures the public has access to the research that those public funds support. OA makes research discoverable, available and reproducible for the advancement of science and other areas of knowledge. When used for teaching and learning Open Access articles are a form of OER. Learn about Open Access and the movement that advocates for it.
Open Data
Open Data is structured data that is machine-readable, freely shared, used and built on without restrictions.
Open data, especially open government data, has generated significant business opportunities, efficiency gains and enhanced the transparency of political processes while at the same time boosting democracy by enabling the participation of citizens in decision making at local, regional and national levels.
In Open Education, open data is associated with open access research articles where the data sets involved in research are openly published in a way that ensures research is verifiable and replicable. Open data and the practices of open data are increasingly used in teaching and learning, especially in science domains. A new emerging focus for open data in education is around user data collected by education technologies and student data collected by institutions. The ethics associated with open data is of growing importance in the field. Read more about Open Data.
Open Science
Open science is the movement to make scientific research and data accessible to all levels of an inquiring society. Open Science is the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes, and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution, and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods. In the context of Open Education, open science frequently involves the use of OER, OA, and open data along with the engagement of the public in citizen science. Learn about Open Science and the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.
Open Technology
The various forms of Open Education have underlying technology infrastructures. Open Education technologies are hardware and software that are based on and make use of the principles of Open Education, providing a means for users to participate in their development, contributing improvements and modifications. Open Education technologies include platforms for MOOCs, repositories for storing and distributing educational materials, learning management systems, online communities for collaboration co-creation, library systems, and other educational tools. Discuss ‘What is Open Source Software?‘ on OEGlobal Connect, explore OEAward-winning Open Tools and find out more about the Open Source Movement and here.
Open Research
Open Research is a practice that makes research accessible to others. Those who publish their findings in this way (under open or CC licences)often prioritize transparency, collaboration, wide reach, and efficiency in research. The goal of open research is to make both research methods and resulting data freely available, typically via the internet, to promote reproducibility and encourage widespread collaboration among researchers. This approach shares similarities with open-source software and citizen science.
In scientific contexts, open research is commonly known as open science. However, the term can also apply to research conducted beyond the traditional science subjects, in fields that include the social sciences, humanities, mathematics, engineering, and medicine. Read more about Open Research and explore OEAward-winning Open Research projects.