Open Education and Open Educational Resources

In this guide you will find information about open education and about using and publishing open educational resources (OER) at the University of Lapland and at the Lapland UAS. The guide also leads you to resources produced by other actors that can be consulted for more extensive and detailed information on the subject.

We have a common guideline for open education and open educational resources. It is based on national and international policies and recommendations guiding open science and open RDI activities. In addition, all activities related to open education must comply with the guidelines for the responsible conduct of research published by the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK)

Support on questions related to open education and OER is available by contacting the Library at research.library(at)luc.fi. When producing OER, you are supported by eOppimispalvelut at eOppimispalvelut(at)luc.fi.

Open Education (OE) means extending access to and participation in education to larger audiences and target groups by lowering barriers to education and increas­ing accessibility, unrestrictedness, offering and learner­cen­teredness.

Open educational resources (OER) mean materials or information in any form and used on any medium, partly designed for teaching and learning purposes, which have been released for public use (public domain) or shared by an open licence that permits no­cost access, re­use, re­purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others. (Public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA).

OER can be for example courses, books, articles, pictures and videos. Resources connected to planning and developing of teaching, such as curricula and evaluation matrices, can also be opened.

Open educational practices mean practices by which education, learning and teaching are made transparent and shared and which enable their further processing.

Our guidelines:

• We encourage teachers to publish educational resources and organize open online teaching. We use strategic actions to support teaching that aims for full openness.
• We require that educational resources and other digital content comply with accessibility requirements.
• It is the responsibility of the openers of the teaching and educational resources to ensure that they have the necessary rights to publish the resources (e.g. copyright).
• We recommend publishing educational resources using a Creative Commons attribution licence - CC BY. If necessary, a non-commercial use or share-alike element can be added.
  • The recommended format for a licence is: © [Author Name], [Name of the organization], [year], CC BY.
• We require that all those who have made a significant contribution to the educational resources, including students, must be properly acknowledged.
• We recommend using the national Library of Open Educational Resources for opening educational resources.

For more information about open science in the University of Lapland, please see our guide Open Science.

For more information about open RDI activities at Lapland UAS please see the website.

Open education guides from other higher education institutions have been used as support in the preparation of the guide.