Section 1

What is Open Education?

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Learning Objectives

  • Define open education and explain its core principles
  • Identify the 5Rs of open educational resources
  • Describe the benefits of educator-owned course content

Open education is built on a simple idea: learning materials should be as accessible and adaptable as the knowledge they contain.

The 5Rs Framework

The most widely used framework for open educational resources describes five essential permissions – the 5Rs:

  1. Retain – keep a copy of the resource
  2. Reuse – use it in your own context, unchanged
  3. Revise – adapt, adjust, modify, or translate it
  4. Remix – combine it with other open resources to create something new
  5. Redistribute – share copies of the original, revised, or remixed version

When a resource carries a Creative Commons license, it grants some or all of these permissions explicitly.

Why Content Ownership Matters

Most LMS platforms store course content in proprietary formats tied to an institutional account. When you leave the institution – or when the platform changes – your content can become difficult or impossible to recover in a usable form.

Open course design addresses this by keeping content in portable, human-readable formats (like Markdown) backed up in version-controlled repositories. The content belongs to you, not the platform.

Tip

Markdown files stored in a GitHub or Codeberg repository are readable in any text editor and will outlast any platform or vendor.

A Spectrum of Openness

Open education isn't all-or-nothing. You can start by making one module of your course openly accessible, or by publishing your syllabus as a public Markdown file. Every step toward openness makes your content more durable and more useful to others.

This work by Your Name is licensed under CC BY 4.0.