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Tutorial: Opening Up Education

Site: Stratism Solutions | Training
Course: Stratism Solutions | Training
Book: Tutorial: Opening Up Education
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Date: Thursday, 2 October 2025, 10:16 AM

Table of contents

1. Focus for this tutorial

In this tutorial we explore:

  • The OpenEdu framework.
  • Open pedagogy.
  • Barriers to Openness.
  • Open Education and Accessibility.
  • UNESCO’s Guidelines on the development of open educational resources policies.

2. Intro to Open Education

Open education can take several forms. Paul Stacey (2018) imagined open education as a growing tree from which major established and growing components of the open landscape hang, including:

  • Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware;
  • Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums;
  • Open Science;
  • Open Access;
  • Open Data;
  • Open Government;
  • Open Policy, and finally;
  • Open Educational Resources.

Current Landscape of Open by Paul Stacey licensed under CC-BY.

Current Landscape of Open by Paul Stacey licensed under CC-BY. Source link.


Additional material

You can watch Paul Stacey’s Keynote presentation “Why Open Matters” in MoodleMoot USA 2018.

3. Dimensions of Openness

Inamorato dos Santos et. al (2016) designed the OpenEdu framework, a support framework for opening up education aiming to lower the barriers to education at many different levels (e.g. access, cost, technology, pedagogy). Within the OpenEdu study, open education is seen as: 

“a way of carrying out education, often using digital technologies. Its aim is to widen access and participation to everyone by removing barriers and making learning accessible, abundant, and customisable for all. It offers multiple ways of teaching and learning, building and sharing knowledge. It also provides a variety of access routes to formal and non-formal education, and connects the two.”

Through open education each and every individual, at every stage in their lives and career development, can have appropriate and meaningful educational opportunities available to them. These include access to content, courses, support, assessment and certification in ways that are flexible and accommodate diverse needs. Barriers, for example, those related to entry and cost, are reduced or eliminated.

The framework describes the 10 dimensions of open education. 

The 6 core dimensions of open education are most commonly found in the practices around open education. They provide the 'what' of opening up education: i.e. access, content, pedagogy, recognition, collaboration and research.

On the other hand, the 4 transversal dimensions of open education provide the backbone for the realisation of the core dimensions - the 'how' of opening up educational practices, i.e. quality, technology, strategy and leadership.

The OpenEdu Framework

The OpenEdu Framework  

(Inamorato dos Santos et. al, 2016)

 

For each dimension, the framework presents a definition of the dimension, a rationale for it, its main components and its descriptors. These descriptors show detailed actions that can be performed by HE institutions to achieve or maintain the level of openness desired in each dimension.

Additional material

Report - Opening up Education: a support framework for higher education institutions.

 

4. Opening Up Education: The OpenEdu framework

In the following video, Dr Andreia Inamorato introduces the European Commission's OpenEdu Framework, which is a tool to support education institutions to open up education, developed by the Joint Research Centre on behalf of the Directorate General Education and Culture.

The framework presents 10 dimensions for opennesses: access, content, pedagogy, recognition, collaboration and research (core dimensions) and technology, strategy, leadership and quality (transversal dimensions).

The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.


Video: Opening up Education: The OpenEdu Framework [10:14] 

"Opening up Education: The OpenEdu Framework" by Andreia Inamorato. Video is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed). 

5. Quick check

Test your understanding with this quick check. The grades are not stored, so you can try as often as you like.

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6. Open pedagogy

The Open Pedagogy Notebook (DeRosa  & Jhangiani, 2019) describes open pedagogy as "a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures."

Moreover, Open Pedagogy is seen as “an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education AND as a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part.” 

In the following video, Robin DeRosa gives a short intro to OER, Open Access, and Open Pedagogy. 

The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.


Video: Intro to Open Education [7:21] 

"Intro to Open Education" by PSU Open is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).

7. Attributes of Open Pedagogy

Hegarty (2015) describes eight attributes of open pedagogy:

  • Participatory technologies: socially constructed media such as blogs, wikis and other ‘sharing’ social media;
  • People, openness and trust: students’ willingness to learn is fragile, with participation and interactions unlikely to flourish unless an element of trust can be built (Mak et. al., 2010);
  • Innovation and creativity: finding new models of teaching and learning that better exploit OER and more emphasis on choosing digital technologies and methods that encourage the sharing of knowledge and resources;
  • Sharing ideas and resources: an open pedagogy needs peers to share willingly within a connected and trusting and professional community;
  • Connected community: a technologically linked community with common interests;
  • Learner-generated: this requires ‘opening up’ the process to empower students to take the lead, solve problems, and work collectively to produce artifacts that they share, discuss, reconfigure, and redeploy;
  • Reflective practice: when students and teachers collaborate in partnerships, it facilitates deeper pedagogical reflection;
  • Peer review: Conole (2014) sees learners as publishers and users of a range of open tools, with peer interactions and critique embedded in the learning experience.

Hegarty also makes the point that it is almost impossible to separate the components of an open pedagogy into neat, segregated dimensions. Components in each of the eight dimensions overlap in many ways.

Watch the following video entitled 8 Attributes of Open Pedagogy - Hegarty (2015). 

The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.

Video: 8 Attributes of Open Pedagogy - Hegarty (2015) [3:47]

This video is created by UPRC and is adapted from Attributes of Open Pedagogy by Bronwyn Hegarty and Open Pedagogy I: Attributes of Open Community  by Dr. Levina Yuen and Open Pedagogy II: Attributes of Open Practice by Dr. Levina Yuen and it is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.


8. Examples of Open Pedagogy in action

There is a close connection between networking, and social media such as blogs and wikis, which enable students to create open educational resources, and open pedagogy.

With open pedagogy projects, students are empowered to engage in information creation through non-disposable or renewable assignments. Renewable assignments, as opposed to disposable assignments, are defined as tasks in which students compile and openly publish their work so that the assignment outcome is inherently valuable to the community (Chen, 2018; Wiley & Hilton, 2018). The student is both a creator and contributor of assignments that are openly licensed, allowing the content to be shared, revised, and reused by future students in a course (Van Allen & Katz, 2020).

In the video below, the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning and education fellow at Creative Commons, David Wiley describes renewable assignments, which “add value to the world, students see value in doing them, while teachers see value in grading them”. 

The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.


Video: Renewable assignments [13:04]

Video adapted from "High Impact Practices for Integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) into University Courses" by David Wiley, Lumen Learning, licensed under CC BY 4.0. 

Examples of Open Pedagogy in action may include (Elder, 2019; DeRosa & Jhangiani, 2019; McClean, 2017):

Students as Textbook Contributors, like the “Open Anthropology of the earlier American Lit” project, where Robin DeRosa collaborates with students in an American literature survey course to create an open anthology of public domain literature to replace a commercial text.

Students as OER Adapters, like “The Power of Open Educational Resources” project from David Wiley, where students adapted an existing open textbook to create a new version tailored for instructional designers.

Students as Question Bank Authors, like the “Principles of Social Psychology” project, where students write multiple-choice questions in a social psychology course that uses an open textbook for which there is no associated question bank.

Students as Wikipedia Contributors, like the “Murder, Madness and Mayhem” project, where undergraduate students in a Spanish course edited and created Wikipedia articles with the goal of increasing the number of "featured articles" on the course's topic, Latin American literature.


Additional material

You can find more about open pedagogy and renewable assignments at Open Pedagogy of Iowa State University and Open Pedagogy by Rebus Community.

Examples adapted from the Introduction to Open Pedagogy from University of Texas Arlington, licensed under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International License.

9. Quick check

Test your understanding with this quick check. The grades are not stored, so you can try as often as you like.
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10. Barriers to openness

Barriers to Openness by Sofia Mougiakou via mooc.ola-project.eu

Barriers to Openness by Sofia Mougiakou via mooc.ola-project.eu is licenced under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.


The two most important aspects of openness, as per Hylén (2000), have to do with free availability over the Internet and as few restrictions as possible on the use of the resource. There should be no technical barriers (undisclosed source code), no price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and as few legal permission barriers as possible (copyright and licensing restrictions) for the end-user. The end-user should be able not only to use or read the resource but also to adapt it, build upon it and thereby reuse it, given that the original creator is attributed for her work.

Downes (2007) argues that “resources which require some sort of payment by the user – whether that payment be subscription fees, contribution in kind, or even something simple, such as user registration, should not be called ‘open’. Even when the cost is low – or ‘affordable’ – the payment represents some sort of opportunity cost on the part of the user, an exchange rather than sharing.”

11. Legal and price barriers to openness

In the video below the chief academic officer of Lumen Learning and education fellow at Creative Commons, David Wiley, discusses the legal and price barriers to openness, describes Open Educational Resources (OERs), explains the 5Rs of OER (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute) and helps us distinguish OERs from other free resources. 

The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.

Video: High Impact Practices for Integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) into University Courses [16:02]

Video adapted from "High Impact Practices for Integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) into University Courses" by UB Curriculum, Assessment, Teaching Transformation licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).

12. Technical barriers to openness

While open licenses provide users with legal permission to engage in the 5R activities, many open content publishers make technical choices that interfere with a user's ability to engage in those same activities. The ALMS Framework provides a way of thinking about those technical choices and understanding the degree to which they enable or impede a user's ability to engage in the 5R activities permitted by open licenses (Wiley, 2021). 

The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.

Video: The ALMS framework [2:23]

This material is an adaptation of Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, originally written by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at An Introduction to Open Education.

13. Quick check

Test your understanding with this quick check. The grades are not stored, so you can try as often as you like.
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14. Open Education and Accessibility

The open education movement has helped people access content that they would otherwise not be able to view or interact with. Open education resources reduce costs for students and allow for greater flexibility for instructors (Sasagawa, 2017). 

In the video below, Tara Robertson, the accessibility librarian at the Centre for Accessible Post-Secondary Education Resources (CAPER-BC), discusses how the idea of accessibility can help push the open education movement even further forward. 

The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.


Video: Open Dialogues: Open education and accessibility [3:29]

"Open Dialogues: Open education and accessibility" by Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).

15. Open Education Policies

The next video briefly introduces the “Guidelines on the development of open educational resources policies” published in 2019 by UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning (Miao et al., 2019). The two organizations share the conviction that  OER can make a significant contribution to achieving  SDG 4 for Education 2030.

The transcript and MP4 file may be downloaded from the folders: Videos for download and Transcripts for download.

Video: Guidelines on the development of open educational resources policies (UNESCO & COL, 2019) [3:39]

This video is adapted from the “Guidelines on the development of open educational resources policies” originally published by UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) under CC-BY-SA 4.0. 

16. Quick check

Test your understanding with this quick check. The grades are not stored, so you can try as often as you like.
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17. References

Chen, B. (2018). Foster meaningful learning with renewable assignments. In Chen, B., deNoyelles, A., & Thompson, K. (Eds.), Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository. Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida Center for Distributed Learning. https://topr.online.ucf.edu/r_1h7ucljsasbkbsd

Conole, G. (2014). The 7Cs of learning design: A new approach to rethinking design practice. In S. Bayne, C. Jones, M. de Laat, T. Ryberg, & C. Sinclair, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Networked Learning 2014, Edinburgh (pp. 502–509); 

DeRosa , R., & Jhangiani , R. (2019, March 30). Open pedagogy. Open Pedagogy Notebook. Retrieved January 4, 2023, from http://openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy/ 

Dougiamas, M. (2022). Open Education Technology for Global Education Infrastructure Launch Paper. 

Downes, S. (2007). Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects. 3. 10.28945/384. 

Elder, A. (2019, July 1). The OER starter kit. The OER Starter Kit. Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/oerstarterkit  

Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of open pedagogy: A model for using open educational resources. Education Technology Magazine, 4, 3–13. Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Ed_Tech_Hegarty_2015_article_attributes_of_open_pedagogy.pdf

Hylen, J. (2006). Open educational resources: Opportunities and challenges. Proceedings of Open Education. 49-63. 

Inamorato dos Santos, A., Punie, Y., Castaño-Muñoz, J. (2016). Opening up Education: A Support Framework for Higher Education Institutions. JRC Science for Policy Report, EUR 27938 EN; doi:10.2791/293408 

Mak, S. F., Williams, R., & Mackness, J. (2010). Blogs and forums as communication and learning tools in a MOOC. In L. Dirckinck-Holmfeld, V. Hodgson, C. Jones, M. de Laat, D. McConnell, & T. Ryberg (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning 2010 (pp. 275–284); 

McClean, J. (2017). Subject and course guides: Introduction to open pedagogy: Examples. Examples - Introduction to Open Pedagogy - Subject and Course Guides at University of Texas at Arlington. Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://libguides.uta.edu/openped/examples  

Miao, F., Mishra, S., Orr, D., & Janssen, B. (2019). Guidelines on the development of open educational resources policies. UNESCO Publishing.

Sasagawa, E. (2017, June 28). Open dialogues: How to make open content accessible. Open UBC. Retrieved January 19, 2023, from https://open.ubc.ca/open-dialogues-how-to-make-open-content-accessible/  

Stacey, P. (2018, March 5). Starting anew in the landscape of open. Retrieved January 4, 2023, from https://edtechfrontier.com/2018/02/08/starting-anew-in-the-landscape-of-open/  

Van Allen, J., & Katz, S. (2020). Evolving Into the Open: A Framework for the Collaborative Design of Renewable Assignments. 

Wiley, D. (n.d.). Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources. OpenContent. Retrieved January 19, 2023, from https://opencontent.org/definition/  

Wiley, D. (2021). Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources. In Y. Arts, H. Call, M. Cavan, T. P. Holmes, J. Rogers, S. H. Tuiloma, L. West, & R. Kimmons (Eds.), An Introduction to Open Education. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/open_education/defining_the_open

 Wiley, D., & Hilton III, J.L. (2018). Defining OER-enabled pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(4). http://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i4.3601