ALT’s Commitment to Open Education

By Joe Wilson, ALT Trustee

As we celebrate Open Education Week (2-6 March 2026), it’s a good moment to reflect on ALT’s long and consistent support for Open Education. 

From early, quite technical forays into open standards exploring the possibilities of content sharing and the creation of repositories, to efforts supporting national and institutional policy changes aligned with UNESCO’s principles, openness has always been central to ALT’s work. A belief in education as a public good is firmly enshrined in ALT’s values, with ALT becoming the keystone organisation in the UK for open education through its support of the annual OER conference and by promoting open practice across the tertiary education sector.

There is probably a PhD for someone on tracking developments, past and present, around initiatives in the early part of the century to stimulate an educational content‑sharing culture. HEFCE, Jisc, CETIS and many others played critical roles. In Scotland, a key milestone was the launch of the Open Scotland initiative in 2013, co‑founded by Joe Wilson, then of SQA, and Lorna Campbell of Edinburgh University. A voluntary cross‑sector initiative, it aimed to raise awareness of open education and OER across Scottish education sectors (schools, colleges, universities). This initiative brought together educators, technologists and policy thinkers to encourage open practice, exchange ideas and push for more formal recognition of open licensing. Then and now, the ALT Scotland Special Interest Group has done much to continue the support for open practice at institutional and national levels.

In 2014, Open Scotland produced the Scottish Open Education Declaration, modelled on the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration. It called on the Scottish Government, education bodies and funders to formally commit to open education principles and ensure that publicly funded materials are openly licensed and accessible. While this declaration raised awareness and sparked discussion, and was adopted in other countries, until recently, it made little traction in Scotland or the rest of the UK. Scotland’s new digital strategy makes limited reference to open licensing for publicly commissioned resources to support digital literacy, so we may have some traction at last.

Open Education Week is a great opportunity to celebrate ALT’s ongoing support for open educational practice, and to look ahead to the announcement of this year’s OER26 conference, which we plan to share later this week.

References

ALT Values – https://www.alt.ac.uk/what-we-do

ALT Scotland – https://www.alt.ac.uk/alt-scotland

Digital Scotland Delivery Plan – https://www.gov.scot/publications/digital-strategy-scotland-sustainable-digital-public-services-delivery-plan-2025-2028/pages/5/

Open Scotland – https://openscot.net

Open Scotland Declaration – https://declaration.openscot.net