Mainstreaming Open Educational Practice: Recommendations for Policy

Open Educational Resources, and open education more generally, is considered to have huge potential to increase participation and educational opportunities at large and to promote widening participation and lifelong learning. At the same time the past decade has shown that openness in itself is not enough to unfold these potentials. A number of elements need to be taken into account in order to move from OER to Open Educational Opportunities. These elements and strategies have been the subject of a two year project, the Open Education Quality Initiative, OPAL, the findings are summarised in this paper. The intended audience of this report is policy makers in the field of education, and science and technology. On the basis of the experience of the Open Educational Quality Initiative we are arguing that the focus of OER work to date has largely been on access to and the availability of OER, We argue that t is important to shift the focus more to the actual open practice of using, reusing, or creating Open Educational Opportunities: Open Educational Practice.