Open Education Research Hub

Openness has always been central to The Open University’s mission, transforming who can learn, who can teach, and who can participate in knowledge creation. At the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), the Open Education Research Hub advances this tradition by investigating how openness can support more equitable, ethical and sustainable forms of learning in a world increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures and socio-technical change. 

Building on IET’s long-standing leadership in research into the impact of open education, open research principles and open practices, the Open Education Research Hub explores openness as a set of interconnected technologies, ecosystems, capacities and value-driven practices. This has both a social and a technological aspect. Our work examines (i) how digital public goods, institutions, communities, policies and practices interact to enhance participation, agency and trust in education; and (ii) how openness functions as a property of technical systems such as platforms for authoring and publishing open educational resources, repositories and discovery infrastructures, learning platforms, open standards, and emerging AI-enabled tools. The Hub also explores openness as a quality of technologies themselves, asking how design choices around interoperability, transparency, governance, licensing, accessibility and automation shape educational possibilities 

Our research is guided by questions such as: 

• How do open resources, technologies and practices enable learners and educators to co-create, adapt and redistribute knowledge? 
• What infrastructures, policies and institutional conditions allow open education and open research to flourish?  How can these be embedded in practice? 
• How can capacity be built across sectors and communities to support responsible, values-led engagement in open knowledge ecosystems? 
• How do socio-technical, cultural and economic forces shape the possibilities (and limits) of openness in education? 
• How can open education and open practices be leveraged to address global challenges such as climate change, social inequality, and lifelong access to learning? 

Through rigorous research, global collaboration and sustained capacity building, the Open Education Research Hub seeks to strengthen the infrastructures of openness, expand educational opportunity, and support the development of open, ethical and inclusive knowledge systems for the future. 

Selected insights and findings

2025

Cooper, Deborah; Wolfenden, Freda; Dawadi, Saraswati and Majid, Zahid. (2025). Developing an Inclusive Mindset in School Leaders, Education Stakeholders and OER Design: Lessons from Researching Networked Improvement Communities in South Asian Contexts. In: Pan Commonwealth Forum 11:Innovative Open Education: Fostering Resilient Societies for Sustainable Economic Development, Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver. 

Farrow, R., Iniesto, F., Pitt, R., Weller, M., & Bossu, C. (2025). Innovation with Open Educational Resources: An integrative review of drivers, barriers and enablers. Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital Education, 1(2).   

Liu, D., Huang, R., Li, S., Tan, Q., Farrow, R., Bandalaria, M., Awang, I. A., Xiao, J.,  Bozkurt, A., Burgos, D., Hawamdeh, M. M. Kh. & Tlili, A. (2025). Investigating the sustainability of Open Universities: Models, opportunities, and challenges. Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, 8(2).

2023

Farrow, R., Coughlan, T., Goshtasbpour, F., & Pitt, B. (2023). Supported Open Learning and Decoloniality: Critical Reflections on Three Case Studies. Education Sciences, 13(11), 1115. MDPI AG.

2019

Coughlan, T. (2019). The use of open data as a material for learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 68(1), 383–411.