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A critical attribute of open educational practices (OEP) is the pursuit of open scholarship which comprises the release of educational resources under an open licence scheme that permits no-cost access, use, reuse, adaptation, retention and redistribution to others. The degree of openness in relation to this attribute will depend on the context and culture of the place and the people in it. When left to chance, the adoption and practice of open scholarship by educators is at best sketchy. For optimum impact, a design-based approach is essential. A central focus of such an approach will need to target educators’ belief systems and practices about their scholarship. Any such work will involve researchers collaborating with practitioners in real-life settings to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development and implementation. The purpose of this paper is to report on how the development and use of such a design-based approach, implemented by the Open University of Sri Lanka, impacted the adoption and uptake of open scholarship among teachers in the Sri Lankan school system in terms of changes in their use of instructional resources, pedagogical thinking and pedagogical practices.

The study adopted a design-based research (DBR) approach (Reeves, 2006), which involved researchers collaboratively working with practitioners in real-life settings to improve their educational practices along three aspects – instructional resource use, pedagogical perspectives and pedagogical practices. Based on the four stages of the DBR approach – analysis, solution, testing and refinement, and reflection, a professional development intervention programme was designed and implemented to support teachers on the integration of open educational resources (OER) and adoption of OEP in their teaching-learning process. Data collected throughout the process using multiple strategies such as questionnaire surveys, concept mapping, lesson plans, focus group interviews, self-reflections and “stories”, were analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods.

By the end of the intervention, significant changes were observed in teachers’ use of instructional resources, their pedagogical thinking and pedagogical practices. While resource usage has shifted from no or low usage of OER to reuse, revise, remix and creation of OER, the pedagogical thinking and practices of teachers moved from a content-centric and individualized patterns to more constructivist, context centric and collaborative ways. The diffusion of OEP was prominent along two dimensions – enhancements in the individual practices in innovative OER use as well as collaborative practices of sharing of resources, knowledge and good practices.

The systematic and flexible methodology adopted based on the DBR approach via a framework designed as a contextualized, process oriented and a self-reflective enquiry has been very useful to support changes in OEP among practitioners over time.

This iterative process allowed the researchers to function as “designers”, while investigating real-life issues in collaboration with the practitioners through reflective enquiry to further refine innovative practices towards OEP. This provides valuable insights for improved design solutions for future interventions in similar contexts.

This chapter outlines some theoretical, historical and analytical themes covering national, trans-national and international trends in open education. It starts by looking at the social, economic and political drivers for education systems in general, and how openness has been used to widen access through attacking the iron triangle of education: access, quality and cost (open as a door). It then looks at the more recent technological and ideological developments that have aided openness (open as a book); including the central role that open licensing of digital materials (open as a right) has played in changing the social and economic drivers of education and in particular open educational resources. Next, it looks at the importance of open innovation, social innovation and communities of practice for open education (open as a relationship) and includes a comparison between the development of open source software and the development of open educational resources. It goes on to consider the impacts of all these on national and international policy (open as a border) before reviewing the social and economic role of open education from the perspectives of lifelong learners, students, educational institutions and educational publishers (open for business in the future). The chapter concludes by forecasting possible trends in open education for the next 15 years.

Open educational resources (OERs) are internet-based digital content that is used for academic purposes by instructors, students and researchers in the era of the information economy. Hence, this study aims to systematically review the literature, focusing on OERs’ benefits and challenges in the academic world.

The relevant literature systematically reviewed following the preferred reporting items for systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The pertinent literature was obtained from four main scholarly databases, and finally, 21 papers that met the inclusion criteria were included in this study.

The findings revealed that the key benefits of OERs include expanded access to knowledge, supporting lifelong learning, pedagogical benefits and enhancing students’ learning outcomes. However, the key challenges include lack of time to find appropriate resources, lack of awareness about the usage and copyrights, quality assurance and technological limitations and lack of organizational support.

The practical and policy implications highlight the joint venture of academia and library professionals to help the students evaluating OERs, quality assurance, copyright issues and lifelong learning.

Earlier studies missed few significant insights of OERs, such as they did not address the quality assurance of OERs; the issue of understanding of copy right (creative common license) challenges related with OERs; and lack of time for finding suitable resources. Hence, this study identified significance insights related with OERs.

The Open University (OU) United Kingdom manages two platforms for hosting Open Educational Resources (OER): OpenLearn, delivering the OU’s OER, reaching over10 million learners a year, attracting a mostly UK audience, and OpenLearn Create, reaching 3 million learners a year, where anyone can create and share OER, attracting a mostly international – non-UK – audience. Both platforms release OER using a Creative Commons license and afford accessibility to learning materials specifically catering to the needs of underserved groups, in other words, individuals or groups who may have limited access to education or continuing professional development (CPD) either as recipient or as educator. Using case studies, research data analytics and survey data, this chapter reveals how the approach to delivering OER on OpenLearn Create fosters community engagement and outreach across a broad spectrum of projects in a range of languages and format often to those with restricted access to professional development within organizations. The chapter discusses weaknesses in the platform’s usability for delivering online courses, but strengths and recommendations for its use as an adaptable project-based tool. Research data also reveal that where an institution is prepared to minimally support the provision of such a platform, the contribution to humanizing education for OER projects globally is great.

This paper aims to examine librarians’ professional motivations and theoretical perspectives to attend to care and student voice, as they pursue open educational resource (OER) initiatives in higher education.

The authors examine OER initiatives that serve as models for their work at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), describe how they have attended to care and student voice in their work to date and reflect on how they hope to continue to do so in their future OER initiatives.

The authors find connections between theoretical perspectives for care in education and the values and ethics of both the open education movement and librarianship. They propose that these connections provide a foundation for librarians to align their professional motivations and practices in support of learning. The authors provide examples of OER programming that attend to care and student voice and offer related strategies for practitioners to consider.

Librarians at many post-secondary institutions provide critical advocacy and support the adoption, adaptation and creation of OER in higher education. Theories of care, values and ethics in the open education movement and librarianship provide a foundation for librarians to attend to care and elevate student voice as they undertake OER advocacy and initiatives.

Informal learning is an effective and motivating strategy to support the learning process. Informal learning has received increased attention recently due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. However, finding effective ways to facilitate innovative teaching and learning through open educational resources (OER) is a vital issue. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the informal learning characteristics (ILC) (i.e. observation, imitation, exploration, innovation and articulation) of teachers in using OER and whether these characteristics have any relationship with teachers' innovative work behavior (IWB, i.e. opportunity exploration, idea generation, idea promotion and idea realization) in schools.

The current study utilized a descriptive quantitative survey approach. A survey with three parts was developed: the Open Educational Resources Scale (OERS), the Teachers' Informal Learning Characteristics Scale (TILCS) and the Teachers' Innovative Work Behavior Scale (TIWBS). The information was gathered from a sample of 2,024 teachers working in Kuwait's public schools through an online survey.

The results revealed that social media, YouTube, PowerPoint and games were the most common open resources used by teachers. Teachers' responses on the TILCS showed that observation was the most common among teachers and exploration was the second. Responses on the TIWBS showed that idea generation was the highest. When using OER, the results showed that all five subscales of the TILCS and all four subscales of the TIWBS were linked in a good way.

This study had several limitations that should be considered in future research. First, the data collection method was self-report. Future research necessitates adopting qualitative methods such as participant observations where IWB can be monitored and documented. Another limitation is almost all teachers have smartphone with Internet access, which may have affected the results. This situation might not be found in other countries since a large percentage of young people in Kuwait use information and communication technology as is the case in other Gulf region countries.

This study expects that this kind of support will be reflected on teachers' IWB which accelerates teachers' movement toward upper IWB tasks such as idea promotion and idea realization. This support will motivate teachers to transform teachers' innovative ideas into useful applications and try to assist teachers' colleagues through conducting workshops or inviting well-known educators to present their experiences to school personnel.

This study can be a guide to help teachers be independent, self-directed, problem-solving-oriented and internally motivated by incorporating the assumptions of andragogy theory. Furthermore, this study points out the high tendency of teachers to use OER and helps to plan teachers' professional development programs that take Andragogical tendencies into account in addition to developing teachers' lifelong learning skills.

The results implied that teachers have obvious ILC toward OER, specifically through observation and exploration to create their own innovations in their work environments. With the appropriate internal and external incentives and support from school administrators, this study expects that teachers will move forward toward upper informal learning stages such as innovation and articulation and toward upper tasks in IWB such as idea promotion and idea realization. As a result, schools as places of work can go through a lot of changes if new OER-related applications and workshops are added.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the evolution of open educational resources OER initiatives in India – how OER movement emerges from the open access movement in the backdrop of an emerging knowledge‐based economy. This paper also illustrates how OER help in democratizing lifelong learning spaces that eventually help in skills development.

This paper primarily uses baseline surveys and recommendations of different working groups of Indian National Knowledge Commission. Relevant policy instruments of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, UNESCO, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and other national and international bodies are also critically examined to understand India's stand on OER in comparison with other promising developing countries. This paper analyses impact of OER on Indian systems of education, ranging from lifelong learning, technical and vocational education and training to higher education systems. This paper also illustrates various models of innovations which are shaping up multi‐dimensional lifelong learning pathways to cater to career aspirations of young Indians.

This paper finds out that Indian OER initiatives make use of textual platforms as well as audio‐visual platforms embracing YouTube, Metacafe and other web‐based streaming video channels. This paper also illustrates the collaboration patterns in OER initiatives in order to attain sustainability, optimum usage and integration with formal curriculum of skills development programmes.

Although this paper identifies external as well as internal factors that are shaping up OER movement in this emerging knowledge economy, this paper mainly focuses on country‐level initiatives. The challenges faced at the institutional level as well as users level can be traced through advanced research studies.

This paper suggests some sustainable models for OER deployment, lessons learned and challenges faced by practitioners and users communities.

OER development has become a social movement. Proper deployment and utilization of OER resources will lead to social empowerment of young adults. This paper helps in understanding how Indian society embraces OER in order to attain social justice and empowerment through sustainable educational development.

This paper is a unique attempt to produce a state‐of‐the‐art report on the emergence of the OER movement in a transitional emerging economy.

This study aims to describe how open educational resources (OERs) were used in a system-wide, competency-based higher education program. It discusses barriers encountered, solutions developed and suggestions for future research on OER-focused curricula for self-directed learners. The case demonstrates practical application of the best practices for OER usage and contributes to discussions among the open education community about what constitutes quality OERs and how quality measures can help instructors select the best available OER.

This case study uses a reflective approach to describe what the organization did to facilitate OER use in University of Wisconsin Flexible Option. The authors reflect on tools and processes used and highlight alignment with best practices from OER literature.

This case confirms that there are challenges associated with OERs, especially for faculty with limited experience using them. It also offers insights into how to evaluate and curate OERs and confirms that students are generally satisfied when OERs are used as primary learning resources.

Formal research was not conducted. This case provides a starting point for potential future research about the use of OERs by self-directed, competency-based students.

Practical implications of this case study include concrete tools and methods faculty and instructional designers can use to locate, evaluate and curate OERs. This case study highlights the role OERs can play in increasing overall satisfaction with learning resources while decreasing students’ costs.

This case ties unique needs of self-directed, competency-based learners with the use of OERs, addressing two overarching questions about OERs: what constitutes a quality OER? and how is quality measured?

For an extended period of time education was mainly formal, that is a system with clear roles, goals and responsibilities. Education resembled an immutable and closed system with few, if any, connections to other parts of society. However, during the last century significant changes occurred in many areas of society, culminating in global reform movements to democratise education and to increase participation by opening up education. A current and prominent example of such a movement is Open Educational Resources (OER), which is a global attempt to facilitate the flow of knowledge, reduce the costs of education, and establish an educational system based on humanistic and moral values (i.e. sharing). Yet, recent developments are progressing at such an accelerated speed that it is hard to predict the ‘real’ value of OERs for educational purposes. Also, within OER little reference has been made to previous forms of Open Education, such as Open Classroom/Open Learning in the 1960s and 1970s or to the even older German progressive education (Reformpädagogik). Current OE forms can be characterised as a mixture of economical (‘education as a commodity’), moral (‘education as a common good’) and social (‘education as a shared enterprise’) claims, each of which contribute to the emergence of Open Education. This introductory chapter attempts to set the stage for a sound engagement with openness in education. It provides a conceptual framework that discusses major developments throughout the history of Open Education from a philosophical standpoint. Special attention will be paid to the concept of Bildung (self-realisation, self-cultivation) as an in-depth theory that can not only inform what happens when learners utilise OER but also allows one to reflect on the impact of OER on society. Selected cases of Open Education will be reviewed and then framed with the theory of Bildung. Eventually, this will lead to a set of lessons learned that are aimed at guiding current debates on Open Education.

After the official definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) at the Forum on Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries in 2002, the concept was soon introduced to China and popularised among scholars, practitioners, and educators. After ten years of proliferation, it is important to explore the landscape of Chinese OER research. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper adopts social network analysis (SNA) to analyse the network defining the citations of 133 OER journal articles published in China.

The findings illustrate that the academic circle of OER in China is small, which leads to restricted innovation. Most publications are produced by researchers working at comprehensive universities and normal universities (teachers colleges).

In these universities, a number of active OER researchers are emerging, but no OER research team can be identified from their citation networks. Currently, most OER research is still descriptive research, and only few case studies are being to gradually be conducted.

As the Chinese OER research is still in the initial stage, more research projects in OER need to be explored to construct higher quality and more influential open content to achieve deep openness.

In the literature, no one has adopted the SNA to analyse the citation network of Chinese OER research.