Open education: tools to get started

‘I find it important to draw even more attention to open education, because there is still much to be accomplished. It can massively improve the quality of education as a whole if you work together on developing learning materials, and it also saves a lot of time. You can easily edit and update learning materials that were developed by others. This way, we keep everything up to date together.’

‘Open learning materials are an important part of open education and often a great way to cooperate on a national level. But open education is much more than that! You should really like at it like a cultural change. It is about making education and learning available to everyone and an environment in which students can be not only consumers but also producers. This has benefits for their motivation (the so-called open pedagogy principle). Watch the SURF-webinar (Dutch only) in which two students, Miriam Groen-Vallinga and I were invited to talk about this topic.  

'So, open education is an entire ecosystem that we must work on collectively. Together, preferably with active input from students, we need to ensure that learning materials are openly available and kept up to date.'

Reading tip: Open Educational Resources in learning environments

Would you like to learn more about the role of open learning materials in learning environments? Take a look at this open access book. It focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the internet and education as a public good.