Open education and open educational resources
Open education
The goal of open education is to improve access to education and participation for everyone by lowering barriers and increasing accessibility, supply and learner-orientation. Open education, by its part, promotes the opportunities and goals of continuous education. Open education can be promoted through open educational resources and open learning and education methods.
Open education increases educational equality, increases the availability of materials, promotes continuous learning, enables the profiling of teachers and researchers as creators of high-quality learning materials, makes work more efficient and increases cooperation opportunities both within and between organisations.
The goals of open education are defined in the National policy on open education and educational resources and recommendations that support it.
Open educational resources
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are digital or other educational, learning and research materials in various forms that have been released into the public domain or licensed under an open license that gives others the right to free access, use, modification and redistribution with no or minimal restrictions
Open educational resources include written materials, images, games, podcasts, videos, programs, data, models, vocabularies, demonstrations, learning templates and courses. Research articles can be used as educational resources, but in the National policy on educational resources, educational resources primarily refer to something other than research publications.
Open educational resources are one way to make project results known and increase effectiveness. They also allow for promoting RDI-integrated education and learning.
Openness in learning and educational materials (in Finnish)
Korkeakoulu- ja tutkimusyhteisön kansallinen linjaus ja toimenpideohjelma 2021–2025.
Osalinjaukset 1 (Oppimateriaalien avoin saatavuus) ja 2 (Avoimet oppimis- ja opetuskäytännöt) Oppimisen ja oppimateriaalien sekä tutkimusjulkaisujen avoimuus.
Korkeakoulu- ja tutkimusyhteisön kansallinen linjaus ja toimenpideohjelma 2021–2025: Opinnäytetöiden avoimuuden osalinjaus (2024)
Openness in Learning, Educational Materials, and Research Publications (in Finnish)
Korkeakoulu- ja tutkimusyhteisön kansallinen linjaus ja toimenpideohjelma 2021–2025: Opinnäytetöiden avoimuuden osalinjaus (2024)
An open educational resource is a pedagogically coherent unit, which has been licensed with the Creative Commons license. All educational resources have a permanent identifier. You can download educational resources to your personal computer (excluding link-formatted educational resources) or embed them into educational platforms. The Library of Open Educational Resources is developed by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI) and the CSC – IT Center for Science.
The Library of Open Educational Resources includes educational materials for various fields from all levels of education.
Educational resources and other data licensed with a CC BY or CC BY-SA license are well suited for being used as building blocks for new educational resources.
- When you find useful CC-licensed material:
- Always check under which license the material has been licensed with
- Refer to the source you are using (author, name and license, address)
- To ensure that the link remains stable, please provide a permanent website address (DOI URN or handle), if one is available
- With different versions, both the original author and the author of the version must be mentioned and somehow indicate what each has done (always check first that the license allows the modification of the work).
- Applying a CC0 license:
- In principle, the author and license information does not need to be reported if the author has waived all their rights and submitted the work for free use with the CC0 license.
- However, it is recommended to mark the license information also in connection with CC0-licensed data if you use the material in question in education or educational resources. In this case, the image or other data differs from data copied from the Internet with Kopiosto’s copying permission or, for example, from a photo you took yourself.
Other providers of open educational resources
Open educational practices
Open Educational Practices refer to practices that make education transparent, shareable and further refined.
Practices representing openness include:
- Peer learning – Students, teachers, researchers, working life and society as a whole
- Having students participate in planning their learning pathways
- Recognising and identifying competencies acquired from outside an educational institute
- Planning one’s own learning by tailoring an entirety from various courses
- Developing education on the basis of feedback received from learners
- Making the provision of education available to a wide public, e.g. public lectures, seminars, videos, podcasts
- Making education primarily designed for degree students available for others
- The use of open educational resources, further development and joint development, e.g. videos, podcasts, written materials.
You can request the library to assist you in seeking open resources.
Policies and recommendations
National policies and recommendations are coordinated by the Open Science and Research Secretariat (AVOTT) of the Tieteellisten seurain valtuuskunta, funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture.
The objectives of open learning are defined in the Policy on the Openness of Learning and Educational Materials, which consists of two sub-policies and an action plan for 2021–2025 (in Finnish).
Recommendations complementing the policy (in Finnish)
International policies and recommendations
The aim of monitoring Open Science and Research is to support organisations in developing open science practices, to support and verify the implementation of the objectives agreed upon in the Declaration and policies on Open Science and Research, and to gain an overall picture of the state of openness in Finnish science and research. The monitoring focuses on steering documents, services, and outputs.
Guidelines and procedures for open educational resources
Below you will find guidelines on the creation, licensing, and depositing of open educational resources (in Finnish).