TEACHER TRAINING IN THE CONTEXT OF OPEN SCIENCE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION

Abstract

Over the last 10 years, as a result of the increased communication and collaboration facilities offered by the Web, there has been a pronounced worldwide tendency towards making scientific research and its outcomes accessible to society. We refer here to the easy access for both researchers and the large public to research results in various top-level domains such as bio- or nanotechnologies, drug design or astrophysics, as well as to the involvement of non-specialists in different major research projects in these domains At the same time, we observe an exponential growth of Open Educational Resources (OER), online courses, MOOCs, books and other materials organized in digital libraries, encyclopaedias, games and multimedia applications, as well as attempts to build a sustainable infrastructure to achieve open education through new pedagogies such as Open Core Courseware, Web 2.0 approaches, blended learning and learning analytics. If, until recently, the accent was set on OERs, in the last years the focus shifted towards the Open Educational Practice (OEP), i.e. the way in which OERs can be used for teaching and learning in order to innovate the learning process. In the long run, the sustainability of Open Education (OE) and/or Open Science (OS) is undoubtedly ensured by a cultural and/or behavioural change of society’s members, especially of the current young generation which will be the researchers or non-specialized producers/consumers of science in the future. In this paper, we highlight how we can educate students/future teachers for a world of open science and open education, both through the use/reuse/create of OERs and the use of OEP, as well as raising awareness of the impact of openness on the development of science and the way it is absorbed by society.