Although OER were already introduced by MIT some fifteen years ago, it was not until the emergence of MOOCs in 2012 that open and online education truly took flight. Following initial announcements from research universities and universities of applied sciences seeking to join the major MOOC platforms or to offer MOOCs, the Open and Online Education incentive scheme in 2014 proved a major impetus for further development. A total of no less than 45 project proposals were submitted, of which 11 were finally approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

Although we have since discovered that MOOCs in themselves do not offer the necessary potential to thoroughly transform education (Watters, 2015), we are seeing a substantial movement in the area of online education that also extends to the Netherlands. Thanks to features such as the frequent use of video in the form of short knowledge clips and web lectures, MOOCs serve as a source of inspiration for the wide range of blended learning and ‘flipped classroom’ concepts. However, it is important to ask ourselves which factors are currently motivating the higher education sector to adopt open and online education and take stock of the relevant trends. We will be exploring these aspects from the perspective of our own higher professional education and academic education practice.

Keywords

higher education ·  · OER quality · OER trends · reuse