An international online mentoring programme Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) has been developed to unlock the potential of open education in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The programme provides an innovative approach to building Open Educational Resources, connecting developers of educational materials with experts…

Open Education (OE), a generic term for a collection of practices that seek to broaden the access to education through digital means, has gained increasing traction and popularity over the last years and from various corners, both globally and in European circles. Rather than taking the technologies OE makes use of at face value, this article…

Will open education replace traditional higher education, or augment it? Digital innovation in the higher education sector is fuelling speculation about the transformation of higher education and the future role of universities. Much of the speculation makes questionable implicit assumptions about current and future business models in the higher…

Enthusiasts and evangelists of open educational resources (OER) see these resources as a panacea for all of the problems of education. However, despite its promises, their adoption in educational institutions is slow. There are many barriers to the adoption of OER, and many are from within the community of OER advocates. This commentary calls for…

In the global movement towards open knowledge society, open educational resources (OER) have become a prominent contributor as a medium of education, research and training. In India, the phenomenon of OER is still in nascent stage. Although the country has been massively investing on growth and usage of ICT, it still requires acceptance of OER as…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as a new approach to distance education, which originated from the open education resources (OER) movement, are becoming widespread throughout the world. Over time, early versions of cMOOCs have undergone changes in terms of use, name and structure. In their short life, MOOCs have been categorized into different…

The University of South Africa's (UNISA) College of Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) stands unique in the world by offering laboratory-based disciplines through Open Distance Learning (ODL) at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Lack of postgraduate programmes in chemistry at the very few ODL institutions offering undergraduate…

This article examines the findings of the recent OPAL report "Beyond OER: Shifting Focus from Resources to Practices". In doing so, it defines current understanding of open educational resources and open educational practices, and highlights the shift from open content to open practice. The article includes a framework for supporting…

Financial issues regarding the sustainable production, dissemination, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education are reviewed and proposed solutions critiqued. Use of OER produce demonstrable cost savings for students. Yet OER development continues to rely almost completely on government and philanthropic funding. This…

Open educational resources (OER) are making their way into a variety of educational contexts from formal lesson planning to just in time learning. Educators and training professionals have been recognized as an important audience for these materials. The concepts of "self-efficacy" and "outcome judgment" from social cognitive…

The increased demand and need for continuous learning have led to the introduction of open, distance, and e-learning (ODeL) in Kenya. Provision of this mode of education has, however, been faced with various challenges, among them infrastructural ones. This study was a survey conducted in two public universities offering major components of ODeL,…

Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). A similar trend was observed about a decade ago in the concept of Learning Objects, which inevitably faded without really making an impact in real-world educational contexts. A number of repositories were created that contain thousands of learning…

In this paper we present the results of research work, that forms part of the activities of the EU-funded project SLOOP: Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective, aimed at encouraging the definition, development and management of Open Educational Resources based on the Learning Object paradigm (Wiley, 2000). We present a model of Open…

The XX IDEA annual conference has been focused and reflected on different ways and means of meeting various kinds of methodological challenges, new technologies and multi-media developments, newly emerging partnerships and collaboration between emerging sectors on one hand and between the institutions functioning with similar objectives and…

Technologically enhanced learning environments raise complex challenges for their designers, developers and users. Design patterns and pattern languages have recently emerged as a potential framework for addressing some of these challenges. However, the uptake of design patterns has been slow outside of the computer science community. We argue…