With the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in China, the Chinese government decided to ban any type of face-to-face teaching, disrupting classes and resulting in over 270 million students being unable to return to their universities/schools. Therefore, the Ministry of Education (MoE) launched an initiative titled ‘Ensuring learning undisrupted when classes are disrupted’ by reforming the entire educational system and including an online education component. However, this quick reform in this unexpected critical situation of widespread COVID-19 cases harbours several challenges, such as the lack of time and teacher/student isolation. This paper discusses the possibility of using open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP) as an effective educational solution to overcome these challenges. Particularly, this study presents a generic OEP framework built on existing open-practice definitions. It then presents, based on this framework and based on the challenges reported by several Chinese education specialists during two national online seminars, a set of guidelines for the effective use of OER and OEP for both teaching and learning. Finally, this study presents some recommendations for the better adoption of OER and OEP in the future. The findings of this study can help researchers and educators apply OER and OEP for better learning experiences and outcomes during the COVID-19 outbreak.

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 selfdevelopment 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.

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 number of disabled students is rapidly increasing worldwide, but many schools and universities have failed to keep up with their learning needs. Consequently, large numbers of disabled students are dropping out of school or university. Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) contain several relevant features, including the possibility of reusing and remixing, which have led researchers to consider using OER and OEP to facilitate meeting the needs of disabled and functional-diverse students in order to increase their accessibility and e-inclusion capabilities in educational settings. The very limited research to date, however, has provided a limited holistic understanding of accessibility within OER and OEP in order to aid researchers in pursuing future directions in this field. Therefore, this paper systematically reviewed 31 papers to provide insights about functional diversity within OER and OEP. The results obtained highlighted that accessibility is still in its infancy within OER and that researchers should focus more on considering the four accessibility principlesperceivable, operable, understandable and robustwhen providing OER. Additionally, while several researchers have focused on several issues related to accessibility within OER, limited focus has been given to assistive technologies using OER. Finally, this paper provides several recommendations to increase accessibility within OER and help design more accessible OER for students with functional diversity.

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.

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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.