Open Education
Open science also offers great opportunities for teaching. Open Educational Resources make it possible to overcome physical and temporal barriers and to make the content of certain courses accessible to as many people as possible.
O
pen Educational Resources (OER) are resources produced and shared in the context of teaching activities, circulating through open licenses across learning ecosystems around the world.
Often reduced to pedagogical documents published in open access, open educational resources actually have a broader scope. They correspond to all digital resources produced for educational purposes, with the aim of sharing them with other educational communities, to be used, reproduced, modified, remixed, and transformed. They are published under favorable legal frameworks (Creative Commons licenses) that provide the legal basis for their sharing, and are hosted in online repositories. Moreover, certain forms of distance learning promote accessibility to these resources for students with disabilities.
Open educational resources are considered by UNESCO as a major sustainable development goal, and it provides the following definition:
“Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright and released under an open license, that permit no‑cost access, re‑use, re‑purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.”
(UNESCO. Open Educational Resources)
The University of Liège has set up a CARE Digital Tools to provide the institution with a structure for pooling human and material resources and facilitating the sharing of best practice, thereby supporting an institutional strategy designed to support teaching.
Since 2017, the University of Liège produces MOOCs, which are free and open to all, as well as SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses, i.e. courses aimed at a smaller audience). The University also publishes critical literature on the use of MOOCs in education.
We currently produce 3 types of MOOCs:
- “General public” content, integrated into Bachelor‑level teaching materials or used as remediation tools
- “Specialized” content, requiring prerequisites and integrated into Master‑level courses and/or university certificates
- “Mixed” content, integrated into teaching materials at different levels, with differentiated pathways and/or optional modules
Parallel to this, the University of Liège is working on the creation of a more comprehensive platform to host all its open educational resources: Oliver.
For several years now, many professors have been making their teaching materials available on ORBi. The creation of a platform designed to meet the specific needs of this content—which varies by faculty or field of study—is the logical next step in response to this demand. In doing so, the University of Liège aims to make the various pedagogical tools and contents produced within the institution easily identifiable and usable by an internal and/or external audience (civil society, international academic community, and higher education). With this platform, each producer of teaching content at ULiège will be able, on a voluntary basis, to upload four types of resources:
- Full course contents (“open courses”)
- Syllabi and course parts/notes (“open textbooks”)
- Tutorials and pedagogical programs (“open courseware”)
- Practical information for setting up teaching activities (“open course frameworks”)
The platform will also allow the hosting of audiovisual and software resources.
