Section 5. Open access to educational resources and research

Following this section on Open access to educational resources and research - you should be able to:

Principles and background

Open education is critical to the pursuit of equity in access to knowledge through the distribution of education and knowledge production. The underlying principle of open education is nicely stated by McGreal as ‘publicly-funded research and educational content belongs to the people and should therefore be open and accessible to them.’ He links this to Sustainable Development Goal number 4: ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.’

Open education is defined as encompassing ‘resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.’ So ‘Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with 21st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.’

There are many components of openness, as described by UNESCO as Open Solutions: ‘Open Solutions, comprising Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Access to scientific information (OA), Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Data, have been recognized to support the free flow of information and knowledge, thereby informing responses to global challenges.’

This intersects with the UNESCO definition of Open Science: ‘Open science is a set of principles and practices that aim to make scientific research from all fields accessible to everyone for the benefits of scientists and society as a whole. Open science is about making sure not only that scientific knowledge is accessible but also that the production of that knowledge itself is inclusive, equitable and sustainable.’

Here, we are going to focus on Open Educational Resources (OER), and Open Educational Practices (OEP) that underpin the applications of open education in practice.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

A nice 2024 summary, Open educational resources can address inequalities in HE, provides the context: ‘Despite significant progress in expanding global access to higher education, profound inequalities persist. Teaching and learning resources remain prohibitively expensive, creating financial burdens and retention barriers for students. Furthermore, paywalled, copyrighted content limits academics’ ability to adapt materials for local relevance, particularly in the Global South.’

The above article also outlines the evolution of the OER movement and quotes UNESCO’s 2012 Paris OER Declaration: OERs 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 licence that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions”. The article also quotes The 5Rs of Openness:

Broadening the scope of Open Educational Resources (OER)

Most of the resources that come under the heading of Open Educational Resources (OER) are individual resources used in the educational process. The paper Plan E for Education: open access to educational materials created in publicly funded universities makes the case for open access to include whole or sections of courses including assessments, not just isolated resources.

Open Access to research

As well as resources designed for educational programmes, many of the resources included under the OER banner are scientific research articles published as open access (OA). This is nicely described on the Open Education Global website: ‘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 public access to research. As most research is publicly funded OA ensures the public has access to what is funded. OA makes research discoverable, available and reproducible for the advancement of science. When used for teaching and learning Open Access articles are a form of OER.’

Open licences

The principles of openness, as identified in the 5 Rs, require appropriate copyright licences to publish the material. Creative Commons licences have been developed for this purpose: ‘Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, What can I do with this work?’ Creative Commons (CC) licences come in six different forms, from most to least permissive. This course is licenced under CC licence BY 4.0 – so you are free to share and adapt the material for any use, even commercial.

Here is a short video - Importance of Open Licences for OER.

Open Educational Practices

The term Open Educational Practices has been created to allow Open Educational Resources (OER) to be put into practice. Cronin defines Open Educational Practices as ‘collaborative practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of OER, as well as pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies and social networks for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners.’  Not really included in this definition are the technology infrastructure, the institutional regulatory framework to encourage or inhibit openness nor the structural requirements for distributed delivery and knowledge creation. There is much discussion about definitions, but rather than enter the debate we have identified some of the issues below. Along this theme, the term Open Pedagogy is also used, as in this paper What is Open Pedagogy? - here we consider the term to be the same as Open Educational Practices, and will not discuss further.

Open educational technology infrastructure

In the section of this course on educational technologies, we discussed the issue of knowledge surveillance, where proprietary educational software programmes are used by EdTech companies to collect and monetise data. As summarised in Digital infrastructures for education: Openness and the common good  ‘adoption of proprietary platforms centred on the massive collection and processing of behavioural data and works generated by educational actors by private, for-profit corporations is antithetical to the ethos of education and the common good.’ The same article makes the case for the principles of Open Education to be applied to the development of educational infrastructure to preserve the principles of the common good in education.

Repositories and open access to courses

As long ago as 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published 50 of their courses freely online, now extended to all their courses. Others have followed the lead, and there are a number of repositories of open educational materials. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is an international community of educators, learners and researchers offering free access to more than 99,000 curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools. The further development of repositories will be important to support open access as a key aspect of distributed education. We discuss repositories as important components of a distributed learning ecosystem in the digital technologies section of this course.

Collaboration and sharing

Openness depends on collaboration and sharing in the creation and use of educational resources, and collaborative practices were identified above as part of the definition of Open Educational Practices. Abegglen and colleagues have proposed the addition of collaboration as a central element to education, with openness as a prerequisite and an antidote to the neoliberal competitive approach to education. While this may be a utopian goal, there are still opportunities for, as well as great examples of, collaboration in today’s higher education system.

Structural and regulatory issues

Institutional support is required for the development and use of OER. Given the competitive business model that underpins higher education in many countries, most university courses and their material remain behind paywalls for the exclusive use of enrolled students.

Funders of research have led the drive to make research findings openly available as open access (OA), with many funding organisations requiring the publication of papers resulting from funded research to published as open access. Plan S is ‘…an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.’ The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have now added to this requirement that they will not pay for Article Processing Charges which many journals require to allow open access to their articles. This is a whole extra topic, including the requirement for open access preprints and alternative publishing options, and beyond the scope of the course.

As mentioned above, Plan E has been conceived as an educational equivalent of Plan S, in which ‘a proportion of the educational resources generated in publicly funded universities be made freely available for sharing and use by others. Thus, high quality education, produced through public funding, could be made available to other universities and individual autodidacts and for the development of innovative educational delivery methods.’  Support for this initiative is yet to be realised however and it remains an idea!

Plan E also suggests ‘a peer review system for educational materials to mirror that already used for research publications. Academic credit could then flow to those who publish and review educational resources and extend to other academic input such as updating the work and creating instructional materials.’ This might help to remove the bias against teaching and towards research, found in many universities, and which is also a barrier to the adoption of open education.

In the section on the concepts of distributed education at the start of this course, we identified some of the structural enablers of distributing education, such as local or virtual hubs. This goes to the point that to increase the scale, system change is required including the interaction between the principles and practices of openness and the institutional, regulatory and structural requirements of a distributed approach.

Need for advocacy

Institutional and national barriers to open education will need to be removed if we are to make access to education truly equitable. We hope that users of this course will see the need and advocate for this change.