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Brokers are individuals who facilitate transfer of knowledge and resources, and coordinate efforts across boundaries of organizations. They are defined by their role rather than their organizational position. Brokers might be imperative for the formation and maintenance of inter-institutional relationship as they have the responsibility and the necessary structural position to connect otherwise separate groups. In the context of this study, brokers had the role to cultivate an inter-institutional community around open educational resources (OER) by connecting groups of teachers across higher education institutes. OER provide higher education institutes with an aid to face the challenges of improving teaching and learning. Yet most OER users encounter challenges that relate to finding resources that are relevant, up-to-date, and of good quality. Communities could minimize this issue, but many OER initiatives fizzle out as expanding their impact is an arduous task. This qualitative descriptive study draws upon cultural-historical activity theory to understand the complexities associated with the role of brokers in creating sustainable collaboration on OER across 15 higher education institutes in the Netherlands. Data was collected from project documents, process reports, reflections reports, and a retrospective focus group. The findings show that brokers engaged in a wide variety of actions but that a small-scale, personal, and content-oriented approach to encourage teachers to engage with the OER repository and the online community was perceived as the most valuable. Brokers also experienced conflicts due to the demanding context they were operating in, the ambiguity of their role, and the organizational constraints they were confronted with. Practical implications refer to supporting higher education institutes that wish to initiate sustainable collaboration across institutes.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10734-022-00876-y.

The movement around Open Educational Resources (OER) aims to make educational resources available to all through the use of open licenses. Our understanding of the extent of reusing OER, however, is still limited. Measurement of actual reuse is difficult. Much reuse remains invisible and happens under the radar (‘dark reuse’). Currently, much attention is given to educational designs where the characteristics of OER (freely available and rights to adapt) are essential (open pedagogy). To better determine which support and skills are needed, a process model for the reuse of OER in practice is developed. This model differentiates between two scenarios: an educator-centred and a student-centred one. Especially the latter scenario clearly shows that support and skills programmes should not only be directed at educators, but also at students.

The affordances of Open Educational Resources (OER) have resulted in various initiatives around the world, but most of them cease to exist once the initial project funding stops. Communities might be a means to create sustainable practices, yet, such communities can only function if their members perceive these communities as valuable. We applied the value creation framework of Wenger, Trayner, and De Laat to examine the value teachers ascribe to their engagement with an inter-institutional community on OER. In this community, 15 universities of applied sciences collaborated on sharing knowledge and resources across their institutional barriers. We collected data through user statistics, an online questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. Major value creation occurred from teachers’ personal needs, with dominant immediate and potential values. Findings on applied and realized values denote that it became easier for teachers to connect with peers, and to initiate collaboration projects across institutes. The framework we used is helpful to inform actions to further promote value creation in communities on OER. Recommendations relating to communities’ aspirations, its relations with the wider organization, and adoption of OER are formulated to inform sustainable practices of inter-institutional communities.

To find out what is needed to speed up the adoption of open sharing and reuse of learning materials and open online courses in publicly funded Dutch institutions of Higher Education, a qualitative research study was conducted in fall 2016. This study examined issues of willingness of educators and management, barriers and enablers of adoption, and the role of institutional and national policy in the adoption of open sharing and reuse of learning materials and online courses. Fifty-five stakeholders (educators, board members, and support staff) in 10 Dutch Higher Education Institutions were interviewed. The main findings of this study are: motivation for sharing and reuse of learning materials for educators and managers is directly related to the ambition to achieve better education for students; sharing and reuse of learning materials is common practice, very diverse and not open accessible for the whole world, and important barriers include lack of awareness of opportunities for open sharing and reuse and lack of time. Based on the findings from the interviews, the last section of this paper presents conclusions and recommendations regarding how Dutch institutions for Higher Education can formulate effective policies to raise awareness, organize adequate support and provide time to experiment.

There's much discussion about being open, with topics such as open source software, open innovation, open research, and open education. Will the whole world be open, and, if so, what was all closed in the past? The authors analyze the similarities and differences between the open movements they've been part of and come up with expectations for software's future.

Over the period 2006–2008, the Dutch Open Universiteit Nederland conducted an experiment in which Open Educational Resources (OER) were offered in an effort to bridge the gap between informal and formal learning and to establish a new style of entry portal to higher education with no barriers at all. OpenER received considerable attention both in terms of visitors and in the media. About 10% of the visitors reported that OER influenced their decision to start some formal learning track at academic level. Lessons learned were both from users and from inside the Open Universiteit. The experiment changed the attitude towards OER within the university itself and led to a growing awareness in the Netherlands of the value of OER in general, in other educational levels as well as among policy‐makers and politicians.

The Guide is designed to raise general awareness amongst policy makers in developing countries as to how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) might address their concerns and priorities, particularly in terms of access to affordable quality higher education and preparation of secondary school leavers for academic as well as vocational education and training. With very few exceptions, many of the reports on MOOCs already published do not refer to the interest and experience of developing countries, although we are witnessing important initiatives in more and more countries around the world.

The higher education sector is changing alongside developments in information technology. This chapter describes the increased inclusivity that the Internet in particular has facilitated and the functions of the university in determining quality of educators, learners and educational resources. It explains a tension between increased inclusivity and the function of determining quality. Examples are presented of how this tension has been resolved in other sectors of society. Two higher education developments are discussed from this perspective of inclusivity and quality, Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offerings. An example on the development of quality within an OER repository is described. Wikiwijs is described as an online space for OERs that was developed in the Netherlands and has been experimenting for five years with ways to provide quality alongside increased inclusivity so that teachers from primary to university level can find, use and adapt learning materials. Potential higher education futures with even greater inclusivity are discussed. Areas for further innovation in distributing determination of quality in higher education are described.

The term Open Educational Resources (OER) was coined in 2002 in discussions at the Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware UNESCO. It describes "the provision of educational resources on open license, enabled by information technologies and communication, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users with non-commercial purposes".In June 2012, Community OER and UNESCO celebrated 10 years in the area of Open World Congress of Educational Resources in Paris, where the Declaration REA Paris 2012 was formally adopted. This calls on governments around the world to establish the adoption of open licenses for sharing knowledge produced with public funds.This trilingual Compendium (written in English, Spanish and Portuguese) aims to fill part of the need for institutionalized information, and aims to discuss in a clear, didactic and realistic way, the experiences of selected higher education institutions who have offered OER. This document provides a unique approach. It combines remarkable initiatives in the institutional development of REA in Higher Education institutions in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Spain with experiences from Higher Education institutions and universities from Brazil, Mexico, and Ecuador, which serve to enlighten the compendium with their innovative ideas and projects.This document has been developed in close collaboration with experts, researchers and decision makers from more than 10 universities in order to provide a global perspective of the OER movement. Some of the more relevant trends identified in this study are exemplified by a broad range of initiatives, including: change in the organizational culture; flexible certification; new business models; middle term institutional strategy; incentives policy; use of non-commercial open source or self-develop platforms; focus on champions; decentralized – federated solutions; open standard, bibliometric criteria; search engine optimization; community building and peer-based collaboration; quality assurance; repurposing and licensing; and open publishing policies.

A knowledge base system is characterized by a separation between application-dependent knowledge and application-independent deduction rules. When used in a business environment, it is not clear what added value this separation has, over conventional systems. It also is not clear what characteristics make a problem tractable for a solution using a knowledge base system. This paper tries to formulate answers to these questions. In order to obtain a sound basis for discussion, a formal model of a knowledge base system is presented.

Making a configuration of a complex product in the course of a sales process is a difficult matter. A sales-support information system (SSIS) can be a useful help for sales men. An SSIS should give support in two problem areas. The first area concerns the problem of getting a valid product specification, i.e. a specification of a product which falls within the product assortment. The second area concerns the problem of getting the product that is the best solution for the problem of the customer. Such an SSIS must be able to communicate in three different languages. These languages are called user-language, functional language and technical language. In this paper the problem of specifying a product in technical language is treated. With the building of a prototype of such an SSIS it is demonstrated that it is possible to give a salesman sufficient support for the problem of getting a valid product specification. The proposed solution for the second problem area has not been processed into the prototype.

This article looks at massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the opportunities that they offer for higher education in the Netherlands. We look at what a MOOC actually is, the context of “open education”, and the discussion of the possibly disruptive impact of MOOCs on higher education.

Group support systems enable harvesting knowledge from groups. The minutes of a typical GSS meeting are mostly textual reports of 10 to 50 pages summarizing the issues discussed, the set priorities and proposed actions. Capitalizing on knowledge generated during GSS meetings appears to be very difficult without additional automated support. We describe our experiences with several prototypes for computer-aided support for consolidating the results of GSS meetings over time. The development of the prototypes resulted in an online service called GroupIntelligence/sup TM/. This service transforms accumulated group knowledge from various sources into a dynamic consolidated Web site.

The free and open publication of course materials (OpenCourseWare or OCW) was initially undertaken by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other universities primarily to share educational resources among educators (Abelson, 2007). OCW, however, and more in general open educational resources (OER), have also provided well-documented opportunities for all learners, including the so-called “informal learners” and “independent learners” (Carson, 2005; Mulder, 2006, p. 35). Universities have also increasingly documented clear benefits for specific target groups such as secondary education students and lifelong learners seeking to enter formal postsecondary education programs. In addition to benefitting learners, OCW publication has benefitted the publishing institutions themselves by providing recruiting advantages. Finally enrollment figures from some institutions indicate that even in the case of the free and open publication of materials from online programs, OCW does not negatively affect enrollment. This paper reviews evaluation conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), and Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL) concerning OCW effects on higher education participation and student recruitment.

Als onderdeel van het programma voor open en online onderwijs werkt SURF samen met de hogescholen en universiteiten aan kennisontwikkeling op allerlei thema’s. Deze uitgave is een eerste verkenning van de mogelijkheden om learning analytics in te zetten bij open en online onderwijs en de uitdagingen (grand challenges) die daarbij spelen.Uitdagingen geïdentificeerd Vijf experts uit de special interest groups Open Education en Learning Analytics identificeerden voor dit rapport de uitdagingen (grand challenges) in de gebieden learning analytics en open en online onderwijs. Per uitdaging is een literatuurstudie uitgevoerd en is onderzocht welke concrete vragen er bestaan, welke nationale en internationale voorbeelden er zijn en welke punten nader onderzoek verdienen. Vijf challenges De challenges zijn: 1. Welke mogelijkheden biedt learning analytics als katalysator van (het ontwerpen van) leren? 2. Aan welke eisen moet een dashboard voor docenten voldoen? 3. Hoe kan learning analytics de vindbaarheid van de juiste open leermaterialen ondersteunen? 4. Wat zijn privacy-­ en ethische aspecten bij het gebruik van learning analytics in open en online onderwijs? 5. Welke infrastructuur is nodig als instellingen aan de slag willen met learning analytics in open en online onderwijs? Maak kennis met de mogelijkheden Aan de hand van deze challenges kunt u kennismaken met de mogelijkheden om learning analytics toe te passen bij open en online onderwijs. De beschreven challenges geven een beeld vanuit zowel de didactiek, techniek, ondersteuning, privacy als ethiek bij het gebruik van learning analytics in open en online onderwijs.