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This manifesto critically examines the unfolding integration of Generative AI (GenAI), chatbots, and algorithms into higher education, using a collective and thoughtful approach to navigate the future of teaching and learning. GenAI, while celebrated for its potential to personalize learning, enhance efficiency, and expand educational accessibility, is far from a neutral tool. Algorithms now shape human interaction, communication, and content creation, raising profound questions about human agency and biases and values embedded in their designs. As GenAI continues to evolve, we face critical challenges in maintaining human oversight, safeguarding equity, and facilitating meaningful, authentic learning experiences. This manifesto emphasizes that GenAI is not ideologically and culturally neutral. Instead, it reflects worldviews that can reinforce existing biases and marginalize diverse voices. Furthermore, as the use of GenAI reshapes education, it risks eroding essential human elements—creativity, critical thinking, and empathy—and could displace meaningful human interactions with algorithmic solutions. This manifesto calls for robust, evidence-based research and conscious decision-making to ensure that GenAI enhances, rather than diminishes, human agency and ethical responsibility in education.

Why is Openness in Education important, and why is it critically needed at this moment? As manifested in our guiding question, the significance of Openness in Education and its immediate necessity form the heart of this collaborative editorial piece. This rather straightforward, yet nuanced query has sparked this collective endeavour by using individual testimonies, which may also be taken as living narratives, to reveal the value of Openness in Education as a praxis. Such testimonies serve as rich, personal narratives, critical introspections, and experience-based accounts that function as sources of data. The data gleaned from these narratives points to the understanding of Openness in Education as a complex, multilayered concept intricately woven into an array of values. These range from aspects such as sharing, access, flexibility, affordability, enlightenment, barrier-removal, empowerment, care, individual agency, trust, innovation, sustainability, collaboration, co-creation, social justice, equity, transparency, inclusivity, decolonization, democratisation, participation, liberty, and respect for diversity. This editorial, as a product of collective endeavour, invites its readers to independently engage with individual narratives, fostering the creation of unique interpretations. This call stems from the distinctive character of each narrative as they voice individual researchers’ perspectives from around the globe, articulating their insights within their unique situational contexts.

In terms of scale, shock, and disenfranchisement, the disruption to formal education arising from COVID-19 has been unprecedented. Anecdotally, responses from teachers and educators around the world range from heightened caution to being inspired by distance education as the “new normal.” Of all the challenges, face-to-face and formal teaching have been most heavily affected. Despite some education systems demonstrating resilience, a major challenge is sustaining quality and inclusiveness in formal education suddenly delivered at a distance. In probing these issues, this article profiles international perspectives on the role of open education in responding to the impact on formal school and higher education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We proceed by highlighting and analysing practices and case studies from 13 countries representing all global regions, identifying and discussing the challenges and opportunities that have presented themselves. Reports cover the period from the beginning of 2020 until 11 March 2021, the first anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak as declared by the World Health Organization. In our comparative study, we identify seven key aspects of which three (missing infrastructure and sharing OER, open education and access to OER, and urgent need for professional development and training for teachers) are directly related to open education at a distance. After comparing examples of existing practice, we make recommendations and offer insights into how open education strategies can lead to interventions that are effective and innovative—to improve formal education at a distance in schools and universities in the future.

The introduction of open educational resources (OER) provides new opportunities for learners worldwide to access high-quality educational materials at the lowest cost. As a developing country, Vietnam is one of the countries that can most benefit from the OER movement. However, the concept of OER in Vietnam remains little known to the public, with few institutional OER repositories (IOER) developed. This study contends that IOER development in Vietnam is complicated and constrained by many contextual difficulties; it was designed to explore the challenges and opportunities. After a literature review, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with relevant stakeholders. Building on the findings from the literature, this study found that IOER development in Vietnam is constrained by five categories of challenges: (a) technological and infrastructure matters, (b) economic constraints, (c) sociocultural characteristics, (d) pedagogical concerns, and (e) legal limitations. Many of these challenges are not identified in the literature and provide insights into potential implications and solutions for future IOER in Vietnam and other countries.

Open Education gained more visibility as a result of the emergence of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This article discusses whether MOOCs should be considered as OER. Open Education and OER can be treated as two strands with different historical roots even though, in theory, OER are an aspect of Open Education. Different OER definitions and typologies are analyzed in relation to their dimensions and categorizations. Furthermore, the four conditions and two original categories of MOOCs are discussed, leading to a debate on their quality. It turns out that there are two perspectives on MOOCs: from an OER perspective, MOOCs as a product can be called OER. From an Open Education perspective, MOOCs are going beyond OER as enablers of Open Education and are understood as an innovative way of changing education. These perspectives are reflected by the OpenEd Quality Framework. The short answer to our leading question is: sometimes, and it depends on your perspective.

Open Education gained more visibility as a result of the emergence of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This article discusses whether MOOCs should be considered as OER. Open Education and OER can be treated as two strands with different historical roots even though, in theory, OER are an aspect of Open Education. Different OER definitions and typologies are analyzed in relation to their dimensions and categorizations. Furthermore, the four conditions and two original categories of MOOCs are discussed, leading to a debate on their quality. It turns out that there are two perspectives on MOOCs: from an OER perspective, MOOCs as a product can be called OER. From an Open Education perspective, MOOCs are going beyond OER as enablers of Open Education and are understood as an innovative way of changing education. These perspectives are reflected by the OpenEd Quality Framework. The short answer to our leading question is: sometimes, and it depends on your perspective.

This article discusses the need to innovate education due to global changes to keep its status as a human right and public good and introduces Open Education as a theory to fulfil these requirements. A systematic literature review confirms the hypothesis that a holistic quality framework for Open Education does not exist. For its development, a brief history and definition of Open Education are provided first. It is argued that Open Education improves learning quality through the facilitation of innovative learning designs and processes. Therefore, sources of learning quality and dimensions of quality development are discussed. To support the improvement of the learning quality and design of Open Education, the Reference Process Model of ISO/IEC 40180 (former ISO/IEC 19796-1) is introduced and modified for Open Education. Adapting the three quality dimensions and applying the macro, meso, and micro levels, the OpenEd Quality Framework is developed. This framework combines and integrates the different quality perspectives in a holistic approach that is mapping them to the learning design, processes, and results. Finally, this article illustrates potential adaptations and benefits of the OpenEd Quality Framework. The OpenEd Quality Framework can be used in combination with other tools to address the complexity of and to increase the quality and impact of Open Education. To summarize, the OpenEd Quality Framework serves to facilitate and foster future improvement of the learning design and quality of Open Education.