A few definitions

“Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.”

(Open Education Consortium)[1]

“By ‘open access’ to the literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”

(Berlin Declaration, 2003)[2]

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”

(Atkins, Brown, & Hammond, 2007)[3]

“Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences.” (OECD, 2007)[4]

“Open educational resources should be freely shared through open licences which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.”

(CTOE, 2007)[5]

“The open education (OE) movement is based on a set of intuitions shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and reuse; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit and judos for contributing to education and research; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not in the simple linear forms that today’s textbooks present.”

(Baraniuk, 2008)[6]

“Open Educational Practices (OEP) are defined as practices which support the production, use and reuse of high quality open educational resources (OER) through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path. OEP address the whole OER governance community: policy makers, managers, administrators, educational professionals and learners.”

(ICDE, 2011)[7]

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone.”

(Downes, 2011)[8]

“Teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”

(Unesco, 2012)[9]

“The shift to the open model of education entails changes much more profound than simply amending the legal status of a particular educational resource (…) The values and practices associated with being “open” are coming to the fore.”

(McAndrew & Farrow, 2013)[10]

“Openness has a long history in higher education. Its foundations lie in one of altruism and the belief that education is a public good. It has undergone many interpretations and adaptations, moving from a model which had open entry to study as its primary focus to one that emphasises openly available content and resources. This change has largely been a result of the digital and network revolution.”

(Weller, 2014)[11]

“Openness is a set of interconnected structural elements that provide the framework supporting education.”

(Wiley, 2014)[12]

[1] Open Education Consortium. Retrieved June 5th, 2016, from http://www.oeconsortium.org/about-oec/

[2] Berlin Declaration (2003). The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Retrieved June 7th, 2016, from https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration

[3] Atkins, D.E., Brown, J.S. & Hammond, A.L. (2007). A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. Report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. p. 4. Retrieved November the 29th, 2016, from http://www.hewlett.org/uploads/files/ReviewoftheOERMovement.pdf

[4] OECD. (2007). Giving knowledge for free. The emergence of Open Educational Resources. Ed: Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. Retrieved November 29^th, 2016, from https://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/7/38654317.pdf

[5] Declaration, C. T. O. E. (2007). Cape Town Open Education Declaration: Unlocking the promise of open educational resources. Retrieved May 14th, 2016, from http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/

[6] Baraniuk, R. G. (2008). Challenges and opportunities for the open education movement: A Connexions case study. Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge, 229-246.

[7] International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) (2011). Definition of Open Educational Practices. Retrieved October 17th, 2016, from www.icde.org/en/resources/open_educational_quality_inititiative/definition_of_open_educational_practices/

[8] Downes, S. (2011). Open Educational Resources: A Definition. Retrieved November the 29th, 2016, from http://halfanhour.blogspot.be/2011/07/open-educational-resources-definition.html

[9] UNESCO. (2012). 2012 Paris OER Declaration. Retrieved May 14th, 2016, from http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/Events/English_Paris_OER_Declaration.pdf

[10] McAndrew, Patrick and Farrow, Robert (2013). Open education research: from the practical to the theoretical. In: McGreal, Rory; Kinuthia, Wanjira and Marshall, Stewart eds. Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice. Vancouver, Canada: Commonwealth of Learning and Athabasca University, pp. 65–78.

[11] Weller, M. (2014). Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory (p. 232). Ubiquity Press.

[12] Wiley, D.,  (2014), The Open Education Infrastructure, and Why We Must Build It. Retrieved March 12th, 2017 from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3410