Open science

Open education is defined as educational resources, tools, and practices being free of legal, financial, and technical barriers so they can be fully used, shared, and adapted in the digital environment. 

Since the turn of the millennium, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has aimed for open educational resources (OERs) to promote global educational equality.

Important concepts in open education include open educational resources (OERs) and open educational practices.

Picture: Oerplatform.org.

Open educational resources (OERs) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, which permits no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others than the author.

Teachers are encouraged to publish your educational resources in the national Library of Open Educational Resources - aoe.fi. 

Teachers can also search for OERs in aoe.fi, Finna.fi, and other places.

More information, see the LibGuide on Open educational resources on the following questions:

• What are open educational resources?
• Where can you find open educational resources? 
• How can you use open educational resources? 
• What should be taken into account when publishing open educational resources? 
• What are CC licenses and how are they used in connection with open educational resources?

Picture: Jonathasmello, CC BY 3.0.

• Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2019).
• Opening up Education: A Support Framework for Higher Education Institutions, European Commission (2016).
• Practical Guidelines on Open Education for Academics: modernising higher education via open educational practices, European Commission (2019).
• Open education and educational resources. National policy and executive plan by the higher education and research community for 2021-2025. Policy components 1 (Open access to educational resources) and 2 (Open educational practices), Open Science Coordination in Finland, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) (2022).
• Neil Butcher, Asha Kanwar and Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic. 2015 [2011]. A Ba­sic Gui­de to Open Educa­tio­nal Re­sources (OER). The Commonwealth of Learning & UNESCO.
• Open Educa­tion Hand­book: Open education is a topic which has become increasingly popular in a variety of contexts. This handbook has been written to provide a useful point of reference for readers with a range of different roles and interests who are interested in learning more about the concept of open education and to help them deal with a variety of practical situations.
• Open educational resources by the University of Jyväskylä.