OE Global 2018

As is the case in many universities, the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) decided to seize the opportunities offered by the coming of age of digital technologies and their attendant capabilities by formulating a digital strategy. This strategy, validated in 2015, aims to exploit digital capabilities to enhance the creation, dissemination, and diffusion of knowledge. UCLouvain choose, however, to articulate its strategy simultaneously on three areas of openness: open education, open publication, and open source.

In this paper, we first motivate the choice for openness.

We then outline the priorities that have been set in UCLouvain’s digital strategy and we highlight various axes of development by illustrating some of the results already achieved, with an emphasis on open education: the deployment of an open resources repository, the realization of MOOCs, the setting up of an open journal system, and examples of support provided to the community, for instances.

We conclude by discussing several challenges to be faced when mainstreaming openness.

Our aim is to share our experience and to open a fruitful discussion with other institutions having similar concerns.