Openness in education received much interest when in 2012 Ivy League universities from the US started to offer Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). Institutions for higher education became aware of the opportunities for online education, sometimes driven by fear to become obsolete when they would not “enter the MOOC bandwagon”. Several European institutions started to offer MOOC’s, using both existing US platforms like Coursera and European platforms like Iversity or the Openuped.eu portal. But open education is much more than just MOOC’s. Long before the Internet created the digital opportunities for opening up education, open universities created a more classical form of openness.

In the lecture I will give an overview of the diversity in openness, both classical as digital. The 5COE-model will be discussed to reason about Open Education. The current state of the art in several European countries are discussed, as the recently launched EU initiative Opening up education. I will conclude with a discussion on opportunities for a European approach.

Dr. Robert Schuwer is associate professor at the Open Universiteit in the Nederlands (OUNL). Since 2006 the majority of his work is about OER. He was appointed project leader for the OpenER-project at the OUNL in 2006. Currently, he is involved as projectleader in the Wikiwijs program, aiming at creating a national infrastructure for OER, initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Education. He is chairman of the Special Interest Group OER for Higher Education, established by SURF and chairman of the Nominating Committee of the Open Courseware Consortium. As of January 2013, Robert is parttime working for the OER program of SURF.

More information: http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertschuwer