Welcome to the Centre for Teaching and Learning and Humber Libraries’ celebration of Open Education Week (March 4-8, 2019).

What is Open Education?

In the spirit of open, the definition below is a remix of the definition authored by the Open Education Consortium (2018, CC BY 4.0):

Open Education seeks to scale up educational opportunities by taking advantage of the power of the internet, allowing rapid and essentially free dissemination, and enabling people around the world to access knowledge, connect and collaborate.

Open allows not just access, but the freedom to modify and use materials, information and networks so education can be personalized to individual users or woven together in new ways for diverse audiences, large and small.

This sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built. 

People can connect with others they wouldn’t otherwise meet to share ideas and information. Materials can be translated, mixed together, broken apart and openly shared again, increasing access and inviting fresh approaches.

Anyone can access educational materials, scholarly articles, and supportive learning communities anytime they want to. Education is available, accessible, modifiable and free.

Want to learn more? Go to openeducationweek.org/page/what-is-open-education and ecampusontario.ca/oeweek2019.

In practice, Open Education involves creating and sharing educational content under an open license such as the Creative Commons license. Stay tuned to learn more about Creative Commons in tomorrow’s post.