3. Potential Impact of the Policy

Globally, many universities are increasingly sharing their educational resources under open licences to promote a positive learning experience to prospective students. Open sharing of UNIR content will most certainly solicit significant publicity and interest and, as such, will function as a major marketing platform for UNIR as a university of choice. This will have the potential to promote the university’s reputation as a major knowledge producer and distribution hub for higher education. From Education, to Social Science, Medicine and Engineering, the implications are that OE cannot be considered as supplementary, but rather as integral to the learning experience. In this case, OERs must be integrated into mainstream institutional processes if UNIR wishes to harness the true potential of OE in the institution’s transformation process. Open Education also holds the potential to become economically and practically sustainable.

Access to information requires a rethinking of the teaching-learning process of future professionals in education, i.e., teachers, pedagogues, etc. It is no longer enough to know; now it is necessary to know how to do in a learning oriented towards the acquisition of skills and competence achievement. In this process, digital literacy, which has both cognitive and technical dimensions, plays a crucial role. These dimensions include:

  1. Having the variety of skills required to find, understand, evaluate, create, and communicate digital information in a wide variety of formats
  2. Being able to use various technologies adequately and effectively to search for and retrieve information, interpret search results, and judge the quality of retrieved information
  3. Understanding the relationships between technology, lifelong learning, personal intimacy and proper information management
  4. Using these skills and appropriate technologies to communicate and collaborate with peers, colleagues, family, and sometimes the general public
  5. Using these skills to actively participate in civil society and contribute to a vibrant, informed and committed community

Access to Open Educational Resources (OER), data and services is of paramount importance in education, e.g., the training of lecturers and tutors, so that they are able to adequately train future teachers and pedagogues. In addition, given the current development of active pedagogies and digital technology, OER have direct impact on related educational research, instructional design, personalization of learning, analytics of learning, feedback and other elements of the educational process.