Open Education (OE) gives opportunities and empowers both students and teachers to participate freely, actively and in democratic ways throughout the educational/learning process. Open education is interpreted to mean “open admission, open as free education, open educational resources and open educational practices” (Cronin 2017, pg. 16). In practicing OE, both students and their teachers can contribute to creation of course content, and take full responsibility in sharing the content they had created and direct the learning process to suit their context. Students and teachers are allowed to use other people’s work from various open sources to support their intended learning objectives (ILOs). In OE, patrons of open education have to use other people’s work/creation with due diligence in order to avoid plagiarism(1). Therefore, both parties (students and instructors) should learn to give credit to other people’s works through proper citation(2) and limitations involved in using open education sources. This calls for information literacy training for both students and teachers to increase awareness and impart skills  to avoid plagiarism and unethical use of open source or free educational materials. Although open education resources and openly licensed instructional materials are freely to be used for teaching, professional learning and research, yet, users should give credit to the owners who produced them. In an event where the work was done in collaboration, it is good to acknowledge the inputs of others. Students registered in OE platforms need to be equipped with skills of how to reference and cite other people’s works and ow should incorporate into their own works.
Another area which makes a lot of sense as far as OE is concerned is on sharing personal work online. Open learners need to understand licensing options that they can use to assign their works or course materials in open educational platforms. If they create their own content, they may need to license them by using “Creative Commons (CC) licenses” (2) which permit others to build and improve their course content (1) and they in turn can use other users’ content which are under CC license.

References

1. Creative Commons Licensing for Courses and Videos: https://open.edx.org/features/creative-commons-licensing-courses-and-videos
2. Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning Volume 18, Number 5.