The Cape Town Open Education Declaration: Open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long-term vision of this movement.
Source: http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration
The Open Education Consortium: Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.
Source: http://www.oeconsortium.org/about-oec/
SPARC: Open Education encompasses resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.
Source: http://sparcopen.org/open-education/
Opensource.com: Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal. Such barriers might include high monetary costs, outdated or obsolete materials, and legal mechanisms that prevent collaboration among scholars and educators.
Source: https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-education
European Commission: Within the OpenEdu study, open education is seen as: a way of carrying out education, often using digital technologies. Its aim is to widen access and participation to everyone by removing barriers and making learning accessible, abundant, and customisable for all. It offers multiple ways of teaching and learning, building and sharing knowledge. It also provides a variety of access routes to formal and non-formal education, and connects the two.
Source: http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC101436/jrc101436.pdf
Wikipedia: Open education is a collective term[1] to describe institutional practices and programmatic initiatives that broaden access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems. The qualifier “open” of open education refers to the elimination of barriers that can preclude both opportunities and recognition for participation in institution-based learning. One aspect of openness in or “opening up” education is the development and adoption of open educational resources.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_education#cite_note-1
Open Education Working Group: Open Education is often associated with the popular concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) – freely accessible, openly licensed resources that are used for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. But Open Education is much more than just OER and involves aspects like opening up relevant educational data and changing both institutional and wider culture.
Source: http://education.okfn.org/
Office of Educational Technology: We believe that educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.
Source: http://tech.ed.gov/open/
Thomas Edison State University: Open education is the idea that human knowledge can only grow through free sharing and collaboration. Open educational resources (OER) are textbooks, videos, courses and other activities that have been created to expand knowledge and are available to the general public via the internet at not cost. Open educational resources can be arranged together to create a study guide or even a course. The possibilities for customization are vast.
Source: http://www.tesu.edu/academics/cal/Open-Education.cfm
Scottish Open Education Declaration: Open education can expand access to education, widen participation, create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners and prepare them to become fully engaged digital citizens. In addition, open education can promote knowledge transfer while at the same time enhancing quality and sustainability, supporting social inclusion, and creating a culture of inter-institutional collaboration and sharing.
Source: http://declaration.openscot.net/
Open Education Handbook: Open Education is a collective term used to refer to many practices and activities that have both openness and education at their core. First and foremost, open education is about removing barriers to education. This may be through removing entry requirements, as The Open University (UK) has done, or by making content and data freely and legally available for reuse. However it also reflects other cultural changes, such as the move to open up learning methods and practices, which sees the blurring or removal of traditional roles such as teacher and student, moving towards roles such as mentor and learner.
Source: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Education_Handbook/What_is_open_education%3F
Creative Commons New Zealand: Open Education is a global movement working for universal access to education. In particular, the open education movement works to make educational resources more accessible and more affordable. Around the world, institutions are increasingly freely sharing their resources — from lectures to textbooks — under an open license, meaning that anyone in the world can access, download and adapt their resources, freely and legally.
Source: http://creativecommons.org.nz/education/
