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Education is a fundamental human right, but for many people there are barriers to access it. Open education seeks to eliminate barriers to education where possible, with the aim of improving educational access, effectiveness, and equality.
View the other videos in this series Read more about open education
"Open education" is the general umbrella that encompasses many different educational practices.
Open Education Resources (OER) are the result of principles of open-ness applied to the materials teachers use to teach and deliver educational content (e.g. textbooks, infographics or images, videos, presentations). OER are teaching materials that are:
Varying degrees of 'open' exist between the different open license options, and even within the various websites found in this guide. It's important to check the license for each individual resource to see how it can be used.
Learn more about how OERs work
Open Pedagogy is the result of principles of open-ness applied to teaching practices. Open pedagogy will look different depending on different teaching styles, preferences, and philosophies, but generally involve:
As with open educational resources and open licensing, open pedagogy exists on a spectrum. The more of these characteristics teachers use, the more deeply they are engaging in open pedagogy.
Open Science is the result of principles of open-ness applied to research practices. These generally fall into the following categories:
Open Science principles of transparency, sharing, and inclusivity "aim to democratize access to research, promote equitable resource distribution, foster accountability and trustworthiness, accelerate self-correction, and improve rigor and reproducibility" (Open Science Framework).
Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.
Our current system for communicating research is crippled by a centuries-old model that hasn’t been updated to take advantage of 21st-century technology:
Our current system for communicating research uses a print-based model in the digital age. Even though research is largely produced with public dollars by researchers who share it freely, the results are hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers. These artificial barriers are maintained by legacy publishers and restrict access to a small fraction of users, locking out most of the world’s population and preventing the use of new research techniques.
From Open Access by SPARC, licensed under CC-BY.
KPU Library provides support for KPU faculty to publish their research as Open Access.
Open Data is research data that is freely available on the internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass to software or use for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
Open Data is research data that:
Open Data typically applies to a range of non-textual materials, including datasets, statistics, transcripts, survey results, and the metadata associated with these objects. The data is, in essence, the factual information that is necessary to replicate and verify research results. Open Data policies usually encompass the notion that machine extraction, manipulation, and meta-analysis of data should be permissible.
From Open Data by SPARC, licensed under CC-BY.
Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. Open Source has long been the default way that most programmers approach coding because it:
By design, open source software licenses promote collaboration and sharing because they permit other people to make modifications to source code and incorporate those changes into their own projects. They encourage computer programmers to access, view, and modify open source software whenever they like, as long as they let others do the same when they share their work.
Adapted from What is open source? by opensource.com, licensed under CC-BY-SA.