We are in the era of open learning. I think it all started with big universities. As far as I recall, first Harvard university protested the amount of money they had to pay for journals in their library. Their idea was that academicians and universities are the ones producing the data for scientific journals, yet they had to pay to read those articles. Later, Harvard university refused to pay and pushed academicians to publish in open access journals. I think the open network learning that’s how it started. Later on big universities started publishing their courses online for free on their websites, as the idea was that the knowledge had to be shared and should be free (if you just want to learn, and not look for a degree or certificate). Later, those universities pooled their online courses together, I think the first one was Edx. MOOCs then started to develop and became what it is today.

Once the pandemic sparked, I think the importance of MOOCs and online learning reminded once again.

As a scientist, I can assure you that this is not the first but not the least epidemic the humanity went through and will go through. Since science is unable to find new antibiotics; viruses and bacteria will return, because they evolve faster than humanity. Thus, open learning era has to continue for education purpose and for scientific purpose. We have to share the knowledge.

For instance, there is an enormous effort in science to develop a cure and scientists keep sharing what they discovered about the virus and the disease. Community gains knowledge together. Entire world is open for data sharing about the pandemic. I think it is a great example of open learning. We learn together as a community.

I know as open learning we meant MOOCs and classroom materials, however I am a scientist and my open learning materials are those science data shared freely & openly.