Lesson 10 - Trends in Open Learning

3. Open Learning

Open education can take several forms:

Education for all: Free or very low-cost school, college or university education available to everyone within a particular jurisdiction, usually funded primarily through the state.
Open access to programs that lead to full, recognised qualifications. These are offered by national open universities or more recently by the OERu.
Open access to courses or programs that are not for formal credit, although it may be possible to acquire badges or certificates for successful completion. MOOCs are a good example.
Open educational resources that instructors or learners can use for free. MIT’s opencourseware, which provides free online downloads of MIT’s video recorded lectures and support material, is one example.
Open textbooks, online textbooks that are free for students to use (such as this one).
Open research, whereby research papers are made available online for free downloading (see for instance open research central).
Open data, that is, data open to anyone to use, reuse, and redistribute, subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share; see for example the world bank’s open data bank.
Open pedagogy, a method of teaching and learning that builds on principles of open-ness and learner participation.

Each of these developments is discussed in more detail in this lesson, except for MOOCs, which are discussed extensively in Lesson 11.