1. Introduction: Context of this Policy and Inner Relations

Online learning elicits additional competences from traditional, face-to-face education. Online learners require an additional determination for exploration, retrieval and categorization of data. Online learners also, as Internet users, must be active; they buy things, read things, combine things, and do not let others make decisions on their behalf. The online lecturer, professor or tutor, must break the fourth wall represented by the device to interact, encourage, evaluate and coach their students. In this context, Open Education becomes the real means of access to and interaction with every type of user. Open data, open resources, open policies, open licensing, open technology, open authoring and open results, are part of the open education strategy from a Higher Education institution. They facilitate and support the right and duty to education that every person has, from informal learning to academic degrees, vocational training or simply curiosity. Open Education is an instrument for equity, access, inclusion and excellence, with the aim to foster a more balanced and fairer society.

At UNIR, we believe in providing students and professors with a quality environment for learning and teaching, with the implementation of advanced technologies and up-to-date equipment. In this context, Open Education becomes a key part of the university’s strategy to combine Open, Universal and Free content (OUF) with proprietary services, and to find a balance between economic profit and social benefit. This Open Education policy depicts the approach and specific services that UNIR meets and will deploy until 2020, so that more and more resources and services are open to every learner and professor, along with the process and strategy to be followed.

As a private, for-profit university, UNIR aims at providing its students with high quality resources and a superior learning experience, along with the accreditation of the right competences. This is part of the business model. Furthermore, UNIR provides reliable faculty, coaching, courses, assessment and believes in giving students the best environment for achieving their objectives. UNIR also gives students confidence in themselves and boasts of an extremely low drop-out rate (<5%). In this context, Open Education has proven to be a corner stone for success, since UNIR integrates the best resources, services, data and networks available worldwide, along with their own sources.