Skip to Main Content

Open Education

Resources for finding and using open educational resources (OER) and other open education topics for students.

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 accesseffectiveness, 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 Educational Resources (OER)

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:

  • freely available, and
  • published with an open license that enables its legal use, adaptation, and distribution.

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

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:

  • incorporating feedback (student-to-student, student-to-teacher, or teacher-to-student)
  • providing options and allowing student choice
  • encouraging students to take ownership of their learning
  • assignments having value beyond demonstrating proof-of-knowledge
  • sharing learning with others

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.

 

Learn more about Open Pedagogy

Open Science

Open Science is the result of principles of open-ness applied to research practices. These generally fall into the following categories:

  • Open Access
  • Open Data
  • Open Source

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

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:

  • Governments provide most of the funding for research—hundreds of billions of dollars annually—and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.
  • Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of compensation. Unlike other authors, they hand their work over to publishers without payment, in the interest of advancing human knowledge.
  • Through the process of peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.
  • Once published, those who contributed to the research (from taxpayers to the institutions that supported the research itself) have to pay again to access the findings. Though research is produced as a public good, it isn’t available to the public who paid for it.

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.

Read more about Open Access

 

KPU Library provides support for KPU faculty to publish their research as Open Access.

 


Open Data

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:

  • Is freely available on the internet;
  • Permits any user to download, copy, analyze, re-process, pass to software or use for any other purpose; and
  • Is without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

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.

Read more about Open Data


Open Source

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:

  • gives greater control - programmers are able to see the code and edit it according to their needs
  • provides training opportunities
  • increases security - someone might spot and correct errors the original authors missed
  • is more stable because it cannot be taken down
  • inspires a community of users and developers to form around 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.

Read more about Open Source