Special Issue: Engaging with Open Science in Learning and Teaching

Technology has impacted almost all aspects of our lives today, and education is no exception. Technology enhanced learning and teaching (TELT) has changed the way universities, in general, and learning and teaching specifically, operate today. The increasing adoption of TELT coupled with emerging philosophies of openness have brought additional opportunities and challenges to learning and teaching around the world. Openness is an overarching concept or philosophy that is characterised by an emphasis on transparency and free, unrestricted access to knowledge and information, as well as collaborative or cooperative management and decision-making rather than a central authority (Peters & Britez, 2008). This new philosophy has encouraged the development of an open culture that is reaching scales never imagined before. Today, many stakeholders in education, such as governments, researchers, educators and students, have engaged in developing open initiatives, including open policies, open content, open education, open source software and so forth. Educators and learners have access to a large volume of open resources. Researchers have also benefited from having access to large volumes of data available in open access repositories all over the world – data that was previously held by only a few, now can reach anyone interested in using them and thus making new discoveries not only in science, medicine, but also in learning and teaching (European Commission, 2016; European Union, 2014). One important element of openness is open science, which is the movement to make scientific research, data, process and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional (Bartling & Friesike, 2014a, 2014b). It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open notebook science, and generally making it easier to publish and communicate scientific knowledge. Although open science is