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This paper presents and analyses solutions where open education and open science were utilised to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education. The COVID-19 outbreak and associated lockdowns created huge challenges in school and higher education, demanding sudden responses which aimed to sustain pedagogical quality. Responses have varied from conservative to radically innovative. Universally, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted and shocked societies worldwide, and education systems were on the front line. The lockdowns largely stopped face-to-face and formal education in almost all countries, and in most cases, distance learning soon became the ‘new normal’. A central challenge concerned sustaining educational visions and ideals in such circumstances. To better understand the state of the art in the educational landscape, we collected case studies from 13 countries during the first year of the pandemic starting on 11 March 2020 (when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic). This paper presents summaries of the full country reports that were collected and describe lessons learned. Our overall aim was to identify good practices and recommendations from the collected case studies that can be taken forward in the future. We categorised the responses on the three generic educational levels (macro, meso and micro) and identified seven key aspects and trends that are valid for all or most countries: (1) formal education at a distance for first time; (2) similar approaches for formal education; (3) missing infrastructure and sharing open educational resources; (4) diverse teaching and learning methods and practices; (5) open education and access to open educational resources; (6) urgent need for professional development and training for teachers and (7) assessing and monitoring learning environments, teachers and students. Finally, we identified key recommendations on how open education and open science can benefit formal education in schools and universities in the future, namely, improved awareness of open educational practices, provision of ICT infrastructure, embracing and sustaining the practice of open access publications and OERs, capacity building for stakeholders and finally encouraging research and development in the area of open education and open science. We found significant evidence for the proposition that open education and open science can support both traditional face-to-face and distance learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic threw the education system out of gear worldwide. This crisis calls for fundamental reforms and strategic planning to continue education. There are other factors, like pedagogy of care, adoption of emergency remote teaching methods, training of teachers, and assessment strategies. This paper examines teachers’ professional competencies working in secondary schools in the rural areas of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The paper investigates how distance teaching and learning are adopted, problems encountered for the same, and modes of assessment used. Data was collected by adopting a qualitative survey design, using a holistic case design to understand qualitatively complex events from the participants’ perspectives. Data were obtained from 122 teachers working at schools in different regions of the TRNC (Nicosia, Kyrenia, Famagusta, İskele). The findings revealed that although the teachers found the distance education process exhausting, they found ICT helpful. Further, teachers reported that distance education was the best training process in the current pandemic situation. Difficulties were reported to increase students’ motivation and prepare appropriate materials for the lesson. They used teaching methods, such as question and answer, narration, fun videos, whiteboard, and online test application techniques.

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This study undertook a bibliometric mapping analysis of research papers on Open Educational Practices (OEP) in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. This study functions as a guide for new research, serving to identify trends in the OEP field and compare the existing research so as to identify gaps and promising future paths. A total of 635 studies were obtained; however, only 156 were finally selected for the analysis. VOSviewer software was used to identify the most frequently used keywords and terms in the abstracts and titles. This software was also used to analyse the studies for co-authorship and citations. The findings showed that research on OEP started in 2007 and focused on higher education, including open and distance higher education. Most of the OEP studies were published in English as journal articles, in particular, many were published in Distance Education, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, and Open Praxis. The United Kingdom, Spain, and Australia were the top contributors to the OEP literature. The analysis of keywords and terms in the titles and abstracts revealed that current OEP trends covered only open pedagogy and open collaboration, suggesting a need for more research on other trends, such as open assessment, open data, and open science. The results also suggested that future research needs to focus more on inclusive open educational practices that accommodate students with disabilities.

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