Open Education Practices in Higher Education

Abstract

Although OER are high on the agenda of social and inclusion policies and supported by many stakeholders in education, their use has not yet reached a critical threshold in Europe any beyond. We argue that this has to do with the fact that OER as concept focusses mainly on building access. There is too little consideration of whether this will support educational practices or promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. We continue to argue that OER are moving from a first phase in which the emphasis was on “opening up access and availability” to a second phase where the focus will be on “improving learning quality” through OER. We therefore suggest that the focus should be extended beyond “resource access” to “innovative Open Educational Practices” (OEP). In order to facilitate the shift from OER to OEP, it is important to outline the factors which influence the actual creation, use, sharing and reuse of OER for learners, educational professionals and organizational leaders in one common framework. A framework of this kind would have to be capable of directing stakeholders towards innovative, open education in which OER play the role of improving the quality of learning experiences. In this paper we make available such a framework in form of a guideline for innovation and quality through open educational practice for educational professionals.