Foresight on the European OER Ecosystem 2030 (2022)
Hybrid Delphi study
The Europe-wide integration of Open Educational Resources in education has remained in its starting blocks (Inamorato et al., 2018; UNESCO, 2019; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020). While Open Education has been a component of educational research and practice for almost thirty years, it has only been adopted fragmentary and on the margins (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020). This stands contrary to the expectations, because due to its accessibility, open licensing and availability in Europe, paired with the digitalization of education, OER should be easy to integrate. One reason that the widespread uptake of OER in Europe is yet to happen, is the lack of distribution of strategies for integration into organizations like educational and corporate institutions (Farrell et al., 2022). Another reason is the ongoing discussion about the differing quality of OER and OER repositories (Ehlers et al., 2014; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2022). Interaction between higher education and business regarding OER also happens rather sporadically, because as of yet, OER still has to be successfully integrated on a widespread level into consisting business models. A sustainable network of OER actors in Europe and the continuous exchange of good practice examples can respond to these challenges.