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Announcements and Keynote Panel: Opening Up Europe Anka Mulder, Jan Gondol, Lisa Marie Blaschke & Susan Webster (moderator)

Dimensions of Open Research: Reflections on ‘critical openness’ in the ROER4D project

Open Education and the Hidden Tariff

OER movement originated from developments in open and distance learning (ODL) and in the wider context of a culture of open knowledge, open source, free sharing and peer collaboration

MIT OpenCourseWare project is credited for having sparked a global Open Educational Resources Movement after announcing in 2001 that it was going to put MIT's entire course catalog online and launching this project in 2002

aspirations of OER proponents range from a desire to reshape the captive market of textbook publishers[8] to the aim of creating "a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge."

its potential is hindered by archaic copyright laws and incompatible technologies. We at Creative Commons work to minimize these barriers, by providing licenses and tools that anyone can use to share their educational materials with the world. Our licenses make textbooks and lesson plans easy to find, easy to share, and easy to customize and combine

We work with the global Open Educational Resources movement, providing the legal framework for Open Educational Resources (OER)

commercial textbook publisher that incorporates CC licenses into its business model. Co-founded by the Director of Marketing for Prentice Hall Business Publishing, FWK makes higher education textbooks freely available via CC BY-NC-SA

UNESCO is taking a leading role in "making countries aware of the potential of OER."[30]

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,[16] which was the main financial supporter of open educational resources in the early years and has spent more than $110 million in the 2002 to 2010 period, of which more than $14 million went to MIT.[2] The Shuttleworth Foundation, which focuses on projects concerning collaborative content creation, has contributed as well. With the British government contributing £5.7m,[27] institutional support has also been provided by the UK funding bodies JISC[28] and HEFCE.[29]

Creative Commons, an organisation that provides ready-made licensing agreements that are less restrictive than the "all rights reserved" terms of standard international copyright, is a "critical infrastructure service for the OER movement."[26]

OPAL has been established through international organisations including UNESCO, ICDE and EFQUEL in order to establish a forum which works to build greater trust in using and promoting open educational resources. The project is part funded by the European Commission Education and Training Lifelong Learning Programme.

OPAL Initiative is a partnership between seven organizations including ICDE, UNESCO, European Foundation for Quality, the Open University UK, Aalto University and the Catholic University Portugal. It is led by the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany and partly funded by the European Commission.

The OPAL Initiative moves beyond the issue of access to open educational resources (OER), and focuses on innovation and quality through open educational practices (OEP). Existing approaches for fostering the use of OER have made achievements by focusing on building access to resources (MERLOT, MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford iTunes,OpenLearn, Rice University, the UNESCO Open Training Platform, the UNESCO OER wiki) and licence models (Creative Commons). However, concerns over quality, the absence of trust on the part of learners and educators, and a lacking sense of ownership of the materials hinder wider acceptance of OER. OPAL seeks to build trust by establishing an environment for quality and Innovation through OEP.

In 2001, MIT launched the OpenCourseWare project to digitize notes, homework assignments, and, in some cases, full video lectures for all of the university's courses.