Skip to content
A person smiling and sitting by a table with a computer screen.
Home Research Open education

Open education

Open Education

Open education and learning mean for us, above all, increasing and expanding opportunities for learning. HAMK is committed to promoting the principles of open learning in collaboration with national and international partners to make access to learning more flexible, accessible, and learner-centered.

Openness offers new ways to improve our operations so that we can provide students with more flexible and meaningful learning experiences and work more effectively with our partners.

Open Educational Practices

We are developing open learning and teaching practices to enable more learners to develop their competences. Open educational practices refer to methods and culture that emphasise openness, sharing, collaboration, and the learner’s active role. 

We are developing HAMK’s open educational practices from the following perspectives: 

1. Recognition of prior learning. We are developing practices to better recognize learning acquired in various settings. The goal of these practices is to streamline the progression of studies, avoid overlapping coursework, and support students’ individual learning paths. 

2. Expanding our learner base. We want to offer new learner groups the opportunity to develop their competencies easily and flexibly. We are developing learning methods that are suitable for everyone and that are easy and accessible to participate in. 

3. Diversifying learning. We utilise a variety of content, methods, environments, and assessment approaches so that as many learners as possible can learn in a relevant and meaningful way. The goal is to consider different learners and life situations, improve the quality and effectiveness of learning, and enhance student motivation and engagement. 

4. Integrating learning approaches. We are developing practices that flexibly link degree-oriented, curriculum-based learning with skills and competencies acquired in the workplace and elsewhere. The goal is to enable continuous and flexible learning, identify and recognize competencies acquired through various means, and better respond to the changing competency needs of the workplace. 

5. Co-creation and sharing. For us, co-creation and sharing mean that teaching, learning solutions, RDI activities, and services are planned and developed collaboratively on a research-based foundation. Materials, expertise, and best practices are shared openly. Our goal is to improve the quality and impact of our operations, strengthen collaboration with the working life, and accelerate the adoption of new solutions. In this way, we build an open, learning, and networked higher education community. 

Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources bring a new kind of freedom and impact to teaching and learning. They refer to materials that can be freely used, modified, and shared, such as texts, videos, podcasts, or games. Open educational resources mean that the material has either been released for public use or published under an open license that allows for the free use, modification, and redistribution of the material. 

Many benefit from open educational resources. Open educational resources make it possible for a wider range of learners to acquire higher education-level competencies and to collaborate across organisational boundaries. For students, openness means access to high-quality materials and the opportunity to learn, adapt, and build new knowledge collaboratively based on open information. With the help of open materials, our staff and students can increase the visibility and impact of their own expertise.

Principles for Open Educational Resources

We are committed to the following principles for promoting open educational resources: 

  1. We require accessibility of learning materials.  
  1. We offer support, coaching, and guidance on selecting and producing accessible materials. 
  1. HAMK’s Competence Tree includes accessibility badges(intra). 
  1. We recommend the use of open educational resources in teaching.  
  1. We recommend that staff make learning materials open access.  
  1. We recommend licensing open educational resources under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 license.  
  1. We recommend using the Library of Open Educational Resources to make learning materials open access.  
  1. We recommend publishing teaching video materials on HAMK’s video sharing service, Kaltura.  
  1. The person opening up teaching and learning materials is responsible for the ethical aspects of the materials they open and for ensuring the necessary copyrights and data protection.
    • Before opening the material, please make sure that you have the rights of authorship and ownership of the material in order. All authors of the material, including students, must agree to open the material.
    • Plan the opening of the learning material in advance: what (whole course, lecture notes, presentation material, etc.) where, how and under what conditions the learning material or part of it will be opened. 
  1. Work done to develop the openness of learning and learning materials is valued in merit criteria and in the planning of work tasks.  
  1. Learning materials produced in projects are, as a rule, open, and openness is agreed upon and documented at the application stage 

Copyrighted Material

Open educational resources and teaching practices should be developed in a way that respects copyright while promoting openness. We view copyright literacy as a key enabler of an open learning culture: when rights and responsibilities are clear, materials can be used responsibly. 

HAMK holds a Kopiosto copying license intended for universities of applied sciences, under which we may use copyright-protected material within agreed limits. Openness is particularly supported by Creative Commons-licensed materials, which can be used, modified, and shared more widely within the terms of the license.

.