Page - xi - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

Book 2: Editorial AboutOpen Science andOpenEducation Daniel Burgos daniel.burgos@unir.net Research Institute for Innovation & Technology in Education (UNIR iTED), Universidad Internacional de LaRioja (UNIR), Spain (http://ited.unir.net) There is a key difference between Open, Universal and Free. In 2017, the OUF (which stands for those three concepts) systemwas officially presented at the 27th ICDEWorld Conference on online learning in Toronto, Canada, to a large com- munity of open education believers (Burgos, 2017). Until then, there was a broad misunderstandingbetween theconcepts ‘open’and ‘free’. I assume thatmost of the misconceptions came from thewrong identification of ‘free’ as a gratis thing,with no cost.Maybe I amwrong.The fact, however, is thatmany scholars, students and stakeholders working on open education overlapped both concepts: whatever is open is always free and vice versa. In addition, in the kick-off meeting of the Erasmus+CapacityBuildingprojectOpenMed(in2016,Rome, Italy), therewasan initial debate betweenwhat the boundaries of open educationwere.Weagreed that something (a resource, for instance) could be open, but not accessible to everyone, and still be granted as an open educational resource (OER) (Stracke et al., 2019). Lastly, the concept of open education has evolved considerably (Walberg & Thomas, 1971), especially from 2015 (Hilton, 2019). As long as themovement is getting broader and deeper, the nuances play a role. We have moved from just OERs to open educational practices (OEP) and, lately, to open science. There is large agreement about a number of pillars that support open education, resources being just one of them. We could name content, methodology, data, research results, policies, licensing, technology, access and more to come. This larger umbrella evolves the previous concept of OER, and the previous one of learning object (LO) (Polsani, 2003), or evenunit of learning (UoL) (Burgoset al., 2007), to a new scenario, where every stakeholder is taken into account, and content is no longer the only input to deal with. xi