Documentation:Open UBC/Education/Get Started/What

Open education encompasses a set of practices that support open sharing of knowledge without barriers.

Teaching in the open means that you are making some or all aspects of your learning environment available and accessible to the public. For some, this may mean the adoption of an open text or learning resource, or contributing open educational resources created by you and/or your students. For others, it may mean adopting a set of open practices related to any or all aspects of a course, including planning and learning.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any teaching and learning materials that are made available to others to use without cost, and with an open license that allows for their reuse, revision, and redistribution.. Many OER are resources that instructors are already using for their courses that they make available for others to revise and reuse. Sometimes students create OER as part of their work in courses. In Academic Year 2018-19 it was estimated that 15,450 students took 39 courses or course sections that were using open or freely available resources in place of paid textbooks.

Open pedagogy can have a broader definition: Open pedagogy could be considered as a blend of strategies, technologies, and networked communities that make the process and products of education more transparent, understandable, and available to all the people involved. - Tom Woodward in an excerpt from an interview in Campus Technology