Open Educational Resources

With the success of open access publishing, Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open education practices, the open approach to education has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. This marks a moment of victory for the open education movement, but at the same time the real battle for the direction of openness begins. As with the green movement, openness now has a market value and is subject to new tensions, such as venture capitalists funding MOOC companies. This is a crucial time for determining the future direction of open education. In this volume, Martin Weller examines four key areas that have been central to the developments within open education: open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship. Exploring the tensions within these key arenas, he argues that ownership over the future direction of openness is significant to all of those with an interest in education.

This open-access book is based on the observation that learning ecosystems are increasingly established in higher education institutions. However, an important aspect that is still missing is their interconnectedness. Consequently, the book intends to close this gap by introducing the concept of a distributed learning ecosystem (DLE). A DLE follows the idea of establishing an interlinkage between decentralised learning ecosystems (consisting of content repositories and educational resources) and thus serves as an integrated approach that enables learners to access and use learning content and share resources.

Learning resources are often considered key intellectual property in a competitive higher education world. However, more and more institutions and individuals are sharing their digital learning resources over the Internet, openly and for free, as open educational resources (OER). This study, building on previous OECD work on e-learning, asks why this is happening, who is involved, and what the most important implications of this development are. The report offers a comprehensive overview of the rapidly changing phenomenon of open educational resources and the challenges it poses for higher education. It examines reasons for individuals and institutions to share resources for free and looks at copyright issues, sustainability, and business models, as well as policy implications. Giving Knowledge for Free will be of particular interest to those involved in e-learning or strategic decisionmaking within higher education, to researchers, and to students of new technologies.

This insightful collection of essays explores the ways in which open education can democratise access to education for all. It is a rich resource that offers both research and case studies to relate the application of open technologies and approaches in education settings around the world. Global in perspective, this book argues strongly for the value of open education in both the developed and developing worlds. Through a mixture of theoretical and practical approaches, it demonstrates that open education promotes ideals of inclusion, diversity, and social justice to achieve the vision of education as a fundamental human right. A must-read for practitioners, policy-makers, scholars and students in the field of education.

Access to learning materials has been an issue within education that has had a profound impact on student outcomes and equality among students. New strategies for promoting more equal access to these materials began within institutions of higher learning and can be adapted at lower levels to facilitate equity within educational systems. Open Educational Resources (OER) Pedagogy and Practices is a comprehensive research publication that explores open access to educational materials and its impact on educational cost, educational equity, and poverty. Featuring a range of topics such as instructional design, pedagogy, and gamification, this book is essential for teachers, curriculum developers, instructional designers, principals, school boards, educational professionals, academicians, professors, administrators, educational policymakers, researchers, and educational agencies.

The university is struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-changing world, and, as a system, higher education generally does not respond quickly to change. Its institutions produce valuable knowledge about social issues and problems, but this is so often not followed by action constructively using that knowledge to effectively address these problems. Shaping the Future of Higher Education generates knowledge to enable researchers, teachers and leadership in higher education to learn how to positively embrace constant change through innovative, collaborative, systemic, critical and creative thinking and action. Through a participatory and transformative paradigm, it strives to create knowledge to enable everyone involved in higher education to move from talking about change to actioning it. The book presents possible structures and processes for learning, teaching, research, community engagement and leadership. It provides pathways to shape a higher education system that is inclusive and student-centred, that promotes knowledge democracy, and is responsive to and relevant for dealing with pressing social issues as they arise. The contributing authors of this book are internationally renowned researchers with years of experience in their respective roles in higher education. Their ideas will benefit all who are involved in, concerned about, and/or actively promote most effective higher education practices.

Based on twenty case studies of universities worldwide, and on a survey administered to leaders in 101 universities, this open access book shows that, amidst the significant challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, universities found ways to engage with schools to support them in sustaining educational opportunity. In doing so, they generated considerable innovation, which reinforced the integration of the research and outreach functions of the university. The evidence suggests that universities are indeed open systems, in interaction with their environment, able to discover changes that can influence them and to change in response to those changes. They are also able, in the success of their efforts to mitigate the educational impact of the pandemic, to create better futures, as the result of the innovations they can generate. This challenges the view of universities as "ivory towers" being isolated from the surrounding environment and detached from local problems. As they reached out to schools, universities not only generated clear and valuable innovations to sustain educational opportunity and to improve it, this process also contributed to transform internal university processes in ways that enhanced their own ability to deliver on the third mission of outreach.

Many in the world of scholarship share the conviction that open access will be the engine of transformation leading to more culture, more research, more discovery, and more solutions to small and big problems. This collection brings together librarians, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and thinkers to take measure of the open access movement. The editors meld critical essays, research, and case studies to offer an authoritative exploration of the concept of openness in scholarship, with an overview of how it is evolving in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia; open access publishing, including funding models and the future of library science journals; the state of institutional repositories; Open Educational Resources (OER) at universities and a consortium, in subject areas ranging from literary studies to textbooks; and open science, open data, and a pilot data catalog for raising the visibility of protected data.

Compared with STEM fields, foreign language (FL) education and second language acquisition have only slowly embraced open education and the new knowledge ecologies it produces. FL educators may have been hesitant to participate in the open education movement due to a lack of research which investigates the benefits and challenges of FL learning and teaching in open environments. This book contextualizes open education in FL learning and teaching via an historical overview of the movement, along with an in-depth exploration of how the open movement affects FL education beyond the classroom context; fills the research void by exploring aspects of open second language learning and teaching across a range of educational contexts; and illustrates new ways of creating, adapting and curating FL materials that are freely shared among FL educators and students. This book is open access under a CC BY ND licence. 

The development and implementation of inclusive and diverse learning experiences is a vital consideration for educators in higher education. Increasingly, learning designers play a significant role in this process. This textbook offers postgraduate students a comprehensive guide to designing learning experiences that are accessible, equitable, and inclusive. It provides advice, principles, and practical strategies to help learning designers create a learning environment that recognizes and celebrates diversity while promoting equitable learning outcomes. Through detailed accounts of theory and practice, it will cover the following topics: diversity and inclusion, role of learning designers, accessibility, equity, cultural responsiveness, open pedagogy, Indigenous-led learning design and designing with students.

This open access handbook offers a one-stop-shop for both new and established researchers, educators, policy makers and administrators in the field of open, distance and digital education (ODDE) to gain a comprehensive overview of the history, theory and practice at all levels of ODDE, and at the same time stimulates in-depth discussions on various themes and issues of ODDE for today and future. Researchers, scholars and students in the field of ODDE can use this handbook as a major reference to conduct their own research and learning agendas. To cover the field comprehensively, the handbook is structured following the 3M framework developed by one of the chief editors Zawacki-Richter. The 3M framework categorizes the major research areas and issues in ODDE on three levels. Accordingly, the handbook is divided into six sections in total, two section at each of the three levels: 1) Macro Level - ODDE Systems and Theories, 2) Meso Level - Institutional Perspectives, Management and Organization, and 3) Micro Level - Learning and Teaching in ODDE. This is an open access book.