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In this article, ambassadors of the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) Open Educational Resources (OER) Advocacy Committee (OERAC) provide a snapshot of regional and global Open Educational Resources (OER)initiatives. This committee has been active since 2017 with membership renewed biannually. The ambassadors work to further OER awareness and understanding, to increase global recognition of OER, and provide policy support for the acceptance and application of OER. This overview highlights national and regional initiatives associated with the UNESCO OER recommendation and the five action areas that include: building capacity and leveraging OER; developing supporting policies; ensuring equity and effectiveness; encouraging sustainable OER model development; and, promoting and facilitating international collaboration. In addition, monitoring and evaluation of the action areas are suggested to be prioritized. This overview is not exhaustive, and much work remains to implement the OER Recommendation at scale, maximize its implementation, connect these recommendations to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), along with the futures of education with a new social contract for education, individuals, and the planet.

The emergence of open educational resources (OER) represents one of the most significant educational developments in the 21st century. Given their capacity to be freely adapted, re-used, and shared in different contexts, OER expand the options for educators. This paper reports on an initial study concerning such choices in which educators' personalities are investigated in relation to the OER adoption. Choosing open approaches has been shown to correlate with personal attitudes and several studies have highlighted the potential and need for investigating how personality might affect OER adoption. To address this gap, this study investigates the impact of educators' personality differences in relation to OER adoption. The analysis focuses specifically on the perception towards OER and the intention to use OER using the Five-Factor Model (FFM) to identify educators' personalities. Following a mixed methods approach, data collected from university educators using questionnaires (57 respondents) and interviews (15 respondents) are discussed in a two-stage hierarchical regression analysis. Demographic variables (age and gender) do not show any significant relationship. Findings reveal that while the explored five personality dimensions do not have an impact on the educator attitudes towards OER, they seem to have a significant impact on their intention to use OER. Specifically, only three personality dimensions -- namely, extraversion, agreeableness, and openness -- have a significant impact on the intention to use OER. This shows that 'open attitude' (mixing extraversion, and agreeableness, and openness) may be a fundamental prerequisite for educators to engage in open teaching practices, including the use of OER.

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.

In this paper, we report the scientific experience of HELMeTO 2020, the second edition of the International Workshop on Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online, held virtually in Bari (Italy) in September 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The call received 59 proposals from nine countries, 39 papers were accepted to the virtual workshop and 26 full papers were finally selected to be published in the proceedings. The workshop illustrated a fast-developing scenario in which the epidemic emergency accelerated the dissemination and consolidation of online learning in higher education. A specific focus of the workshop can be identified as students' learning experience, with studies on tutoring and active learning approaches, personalized solutions supported by data analysis, virtual reality and an in-depth analysis of human-computer interactions.

While several studies have investigated the various effects of open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP), few have focused on its connection to learning achievement. The related scientific literature is divided about the effects of OER and OEP with regards to their contribution to learning achievement. To address this tension, a meta-analysis and research synthesis of 25 studies (N = 119,840 participants) was conducted to quantitatively investigate the effects of OER and OEP on students' learning achievement. The analysis included course subject, level of education, intervention duration, sample size, geographical distribution, and research design as moderating variables of the obtained effects. The findings revealed that OER and OEP have a significant yet negligible (g = 0.07, p < 0.001) effect. Additionally, the analysis found that the obtained effect can be moderated by several variables, including course subject, level of education and geographical distribution. The study findings can help various stakeholders (e.g., educators, instructional designers or policy makers) in understanding what might hinder OER and OEP effect on learning achievement, hence accommodating better learning outcomes and more effective interventions.

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.

The concepts of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP), regarded as two pillars of the broader open education movement, have been evolving since the concept of OER was first coined in the 2012 Paris Declaration. Several research studies have been conducted to investigate the impacts of OER and OEP adoption and implementation in universities. However, most of those studies have focused on western and developed countries, and little information is known about developing countries, especially Asian ones. Particularly, China was one of the first Asian countries to adopt open education and its related strategies following the MIT OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing in 2003. This study conducts a systematic literature review to investigate the current state of the art of OER and OEP in China. The findings show that several governmental, organizational, and institutional initiatives have been launched to facilitate OER adoption in China. They also show that while several OEPs have been implemented, there is still a continuous need to work on these practices and further investigate their impacts on learning outcomes and behaviors, as no current reviewed study has done so. Finally, a generic framework of OER and OEP challenges is presented along with recommendations to further enhance the adoption of OER and OEP in China.

The goal of this paper is to advance the understanding of the way university educators currently adopt open educational practices (OEP) by analyzing the relation between the use of open educational resources (OER) and the implementation of open teaching practices. The results are based on data collected through an online survey among 724 university educators. Depending on the actual use of OER and open teaching practices by the survey respondents, we have categorized them along a scale that goes from "novice" to "expert", and we analyzed the data to evaluate their use of OER and their adoption of open teaching practices, looking for relationships between the two phenomena. The main finding of this paper, which confirms the latest research findings from the open education community, is that a strong relationship exists between the two dimensions: The more an educator uses OER, the more he will probably adopt open teaching practices, and vice versa. These results are discussed with a view to use this virtuous circle between the use of open content and adoption of open teaching as a way to build generalized open education capacity among universities' teaching staff.

The Metaverse has been the centre of attraction for educationists for quite some time. This field got renewed interest with the announcement of social media giant Facebook as it rebranding and positioning it as Meta. While several studies conducted literature reviews to summarize the findings related to the Metaverse in general, no study to the best of our knowledge focused on systematically summarizing the finding related to the Metaverse in education. To cover this gap, this study conducts a systematic literature review of the Metaverse in education. It then applies both content and bibliometric analysis to reveal the research trends, focus, and limitations of this research topic. The obtained findings reveal the research gap in lifelogging applications in educational Metaverse. The findings also show that the design of Metaverse in education has evolved over generations, where generation Z is more targeted with artificial intelligence technologies compared to generation X or Y. In terms of learning scenarios, there have been very few studies focusing on mobile learning, hybrid learning, and micro learning. Additionally, no study focused on using the Metaverse in education for students with disabilities. The findings of this study provide a roadmap of future research directions to be taken into consideration and investigated to enhance the adoption of the Metaverse in education worldwide, as well as to enhance the learning and teaching experiences in the Metaverse.

This paper presents how virtual containers enhance the implementation of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) subjects as Open Educational Resources (OER). The publication initially summarizes the limitations of delivering open rich learning contents and corresponding assignments to students in college level STEAM areas. The role that virtual containers can play in current distant education is then discussed, starting by reviewing related teaching efforts around the use of legacy virtual machines. We then focus on the superseding container technology and how it can bridge the gap between online students, humble computing resources, teachers and IT specificities. As a practical example, we present an experience carried out at the online School of Engineering & Technology at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR). Within the context of a subject about Physics for Computing Engineers, we describe the satisfactory evolution from using conventional software distribution methods towards the transition to virtual containers. Thanks to this virtualization approach, the necessary student activities can be implemented, the required software tools can be easily distributed, and the accompanying documentation can be seamlessly presented. The results show how student engagement and satisfaction increased over time, partly because of the easiness introduced by the container technology. Our experience proves that combining containerized educational resources and free and open distribution channels can be one of the cornerstones of a new OER approach in STEAM subjects.

The paper explores the change process that university teachers need to go through in order to become fluent with Open Education approaches. Based on a literature review and a set of interviews with a number of leading experts in the field of Open Educational Resources and Open Education, the paper puts forward an original definition of Open Educator which takes into account all the components of teachers' work: learning design, teaching resources, pedagogical approaches and assessment methods of teachers' activities. Subsequently, to help the development of teachers' openness capacity, the definition is further developed into a holistic framework for teachers, which takes into account all the dimensions of openness included in the definition and which provides teachers with self-development paths along each dimension. By working on the definition and on the framework with the interviewed experts, the paper concludes that a strong relation exists between the use of open approaches and the networking and collaboration attitude of university teachers, and that in order to overcome the technical and cultural barriers that hinder the use of open approaches in Higher Education, it is important to work on the transition phases--in terms of awareness and of capacity building--that teachers have to go through in their journey towards openness.

The paper describes a classification system for adaptive methods developed in the area of adaptive educational hypermedia based on four dimensions: What components of the educational system are adapted? To what features of the user and the current context does the system adapt? Why does the system adapt? How does the system get the necessary information? Based on this taxonomy several classical methods of adaptive educational hypermedia are classified. In a second step the paper gives an overview of key features in IMS-LD for implementing adaptive educational methods and gives some examples. In the last section the work is integrated and IMS-LD features are identified which can be used for the four dimensions of the classification system. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology whose presence has increased in the field of education in recent years. However, its role in secondary education has not been thoroughly explored. Therefore, this research aims to analyse the influence of AR on the motivation of students at this stage while considering gender and previous information and communication technology (ICT) experience. This research uses a quantitative methodology that follows Keller's Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction (ARCS) motivational model. We implemented this instructional design model for a sample of 321 students from the same educational centre. They were divided into two categories: an experimental group (n = 159) and a control group (n = 162). The control group were studied in a slide-based learning environment, while the experimental group worked with an AR mobile application. For data collection, we used the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS). The results showed that the students who used AR displayed greater motivation, highlighting great interest in the integration of this technology into the learning process. However, no significant differences were obtained in the motivation of the students according to gender and previous experience with the use of ICT. In conclusion, this research shows that the use of AR improves motivation in secondary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]