8. Engagement of Students into the Open Education Policy

University learning has changed in the past years. We are in the so-called conceptual society, in which students are required to be able to interpret complex relationships, find creative solutions and to develop their emotional intelligence and self-directed learning as they engage with content, and with their peers and instructors. Students must be effective communicators and producers; collaborative workers; skilled consumers and processors of information. They must be able to develop meta-cognition, be digitally literate and trained to synthesize diverse ideas. The age of analogue textbooks and closed information has already passed. Now it is necessary to know and access open resources that are constantly being updated. Also, policies of open access to scientific knowledge have progressed remarkably. Evidence of this is the infinite number of open digital repositories in universities and research centres. Faced with this scenario, university students should not be limited to static and closed sources of knowledge; they should know how to search, select, evaluate, and use resources appropriately and ideally, create new and valuable resources. For this, it is essential to have specific training that will enable students to carry out these operations and to know the licences under which these resources can be used, such as Creative Commons, in order to use them in a responsible manner.