A technical architecture for open access education

In the last ten years, the idea of openness in education to address issues of knowledge hoarding and social inequity has received considerable attention from a variety of educational institutions and individuals. Today, it is a common practice that universities produce open educational resources (OERs) to be shared and reused cross-institutionally. However, the effective authoring, deployment and distribution of such educational resources is a complex task with a number of issues that still remain relevant for the massive adoption of the OERs paradigm. From the technology viewpoint, a major issue holding back the effective adoption in higher education is the lack of an open source, highly interoperable educational platform that has all of the affordances needed for modern OERs, including mobile delivery and accessibility. In this paper, we describe the Actionable Data Book (ADBook) standard currently under development, a technology-enabled learning environment which can potentially address the challenges for the delivery of transformative open access education. Further, the affordances of the ADBook might lay the foundations of a global platform for connected and inclusive education in all educational and training situations, including those in developing countries, for instance, where innovative solutions will be required to advance national educational goals.