Open Education
Open Education aims at sharing and re-using high-quality educational experiences and resources for everyone, independent of time, place and costs. This allows not just sharing and access, but the freedom to modify and use materials, information and networks so education can be personalized to individual users or changed for diverse audiences.
Open educational resources (OER) are part of Open Education and are defined as any kind of teaching material, such as a textbook, reader, lecture slides, video clip, that is created and published under an open license. Depending on the license, OER can be reused, revised, remixed, retained and redistributed, which opens up many possibilities.
The benefits of Open Education
Open Education and the use of OER have multiple benefits:
- Improve quality of education
- Remix educational materials to better fit to the students’ needs
- Can easily be adapted to latest insights
- Are cost-free
- Reduce barriers to quality education
WUR policy regarding Open Educational Resources
Wageningen University & Research encourages staff to use, create and share open digital educational resources and intends to share all its educational materials with anyone outside the university.
The default license to publish our newly developed educational materials is the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC. This allows users to share and adapt the material for non-commercial usage.
More information about the WUR policy for Open Educational Resources can be found in our policy document (will be published soon).
How to open up your education
You can start opening up your education by sharing your own educational resources openly with other teachers. Within the WUR we have our own repository for learning materials, the Library for Learning (L4L). As WUR teacher, you can easily upload your own material to share within WUR only or make it accessible to everyone. Opting to share openly means your resources will also be discoverable on the national platform edusources.
Many open educational resources covering diverse subjects are already available. Read more on WUR Library website on how to find, use and cite open materials in your education.
Open Education on national level
Every university and applied sciences institution in the Netherlands is actively engaged in the Open Science and Education initiative. Are you curious about the latest developments at the national level? Join the edusources community, the national community to collaborate on open educational resources.
Additionally, WUR participates in the national Npuls programme, aimed at enhancing digital learning resources, and in the libraries working group dedicated to online and open education.