Recently, the potential for a worldwide dissemination of education and learning resources via the internet has encouraged a lively discussion about "open education" and "open educational resources" (OER). Open educational resources are materials and tools for teaching and learning that are "openly" available, thus providing teachers and students with an increasing amount of resources for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Informational ecosystems, which consist of hardware appliances, operating systems, tools and standards for documents, are shaping the access and circulation of this kind of knowledge. However, there is an ongoing discussion of which conditions and features are valuable for educational practices and which attributes may hinder a constructive use for educational purposes.

Initially, the discussion of OER was strongly connected to politically motivated endeavors of providing access to knowledge for the so-called developing and emerging countries. Diverse actors articulated their arguments in this field ranging from transnational organisations like UNESCO and the OECD, to universities and national as well as European stakeholders. In recent years the discourse has changed in countries with more advanced educational systems. One salient topic, which made OER prominent while dominating the discussion, concerned licenses and licensing schemes for educational resources: Given a growing awareness of legal issues, teachers were concerned about the limitations of using digital materials in the classroom context, e.g. on learning platforms. The “Creative Commons Licenses” provide a schema that helps producers and users to communicate the legal use of these materials more clearly but challenges the business models familiar to conventional schoolbook publishers.

From an educational point of view, the discussion of OER, however, cannot be reduced to the provision of materials that are made accessible by a certain licensing schema: Capacities and boundaries of OER for pedagogical practice come into focus. Increasingly, these “open” materials are embedded in “closed” informational ecosystems that force teachers and students to use certain hardware or software. In this session, we will discuss OER as an educational and socio-technical phenomenon that will not solve educational problems by itself. Instead, we would like to take into account the heterogeneity of educational systems in Europe and beyond and argue that OER capacities can solely be identified and realised in as far as their embeddedness in situated pedagogical practices and infrastructures is reconsidered.