Open Education encompasses resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.

The foundation of Open Education is Open Educational Resources (OER), which are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere. “Open” permissions are typically defined in terms of the “5R’s”: users are free to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute these educational materials.

-SPARC Open Education Open Education - SPARC (sparcopen.org)

What does this mean for students?

The concept of open education means that students get to bring your prior experience and expertise into the classroom to inform your learning and that of your classmates. It also means that students get to produce meaningful work that can be shared outside the classroom. Student knowledge is seen and valued within a broader community.

Open educational resources (OER) are an important component of open education. OER are learning materials that are free to access and grant permission for anyone to copy, reuse, revise, remix, and share them, as long as they give credit to the author. In open education, students save money by using OER for learning, and they also produce and share OER with others. Examples include annotating scholarly articles, creating a shared bibliography, blogging, editing Wikipedia articles, creating tutorials for other learners, engaging in research and openly publishing the results, or even co-authoring a textbook. Read what student Miranda Dean had to say about her open education experience.

There are many ways for students to share their knowledge with the world. Wikis, such as Wikipedia, depend on active communities to contribute quality content for everyone's benefit. They are great places for students to get started.