Educational policies increasingly emphasise innovation and organisational change of educational institutions that are considered necessary to better align education and lifelong learning with the requirements of the knowledge society. However, new educational approaches are not easily found and their implementation will be difficult if they require considerable transformations of current educational frameworks and practices.
What has been achieved so far is a better definition of key competences that are considered to be of importance for successful participation in the knowledge society. Much less consolidated is the understanding of how such competences should preferably be developed in learning processes.
OLCOS thinks that priority must be given to open educational practices that involve students in active, constructive engagement with content, tools and services in the learning process, and promote learners’ self-management, creativity and working in teams. Furthermore, this chapter introduces the idea of value chains of open educational content which emerge when teachers and students re-use available content and make enriched and/or additional material (e.g. use cases, experiences, lessons learned, etc.) available again to a larger community of practice.
Such an understanding of educational content differs considerably from the currently still dominant concept of educational content as “canned products” that are to be delivered by a few educational providers (e.g. educational publishers or repositories) to teachers and learners. However, we think that particularly in the context of Open Educational Resources it is essential to explore other models of content creation, sharing and re-use.