Openness refers to transparency, which is usually seen as accessing to information freely. However, in practice, I think openness should be applied and seen in a wider perspective. Openness should be considered at two major levels, which are (i) content or information, and (ii) raw data.
Openness in higher education and research requires higher level of transparency. Students and researchers should have the opportunity to assess and evaluate the work. This means that the raw data should be accessible to the community in order to validate the correctness. This provides more trust to the reader as the content without justifications is usually insufficient.
In computer science, students should be allowed to access open source software and source codes to redo other works. This is highly important when it comes on enhancing other works as the benchmark should be available. Most publishers do not add this restriction on authors to publish their source codes, but I think this is one of the major indicators for evaluating the correctness of the results.
Based on my personal experience, publishing the raw data and source codes is very appreciated by different communities as more students will have the possibility of benefiting from the published work. Any higher education course should follow same strategy to students have right to access information in different levels.
Openness has also tight relation with accessibility. This means that the information should be available to all groups, specially those with special needs (disabilities). Directive (EU) 2016/2102, in force since 22 December 2016, will provide people with disabilities with better access to the websites and mobile apps of public services. (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/web-accessibility).
Accessibility should be provided for different devices (e.g. laptop, phone, tablet), different operating systems (e.g. Mac OS, Windows, Linux) and different browsers (e.g. Chrome, Safari, Mozilla). Although this could be seen as a low priority issue, but in practice we see this issue very serious as people cannot access a web application since it is not supported in the device or browser or OS.
I found the following article entitled “How openness impacts on higher education” very relevant to this topic:
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000244262
