As a first step, ICORE is facilitating a pre-conference workshop at the 26th ICDE Global Conference, 13 October 2015 in Sun City, South Africa. This workshop debates open research and open education and their potential and impact in the societies worldwide with special focus on re-establishing openness as default.

Opening up education by innovations like online cooperation, MOOCs and technology-enhanced learning has achieved broad awareness and agreement supported by the UNESCO OER Declaration and newly launched policies, e.g., by the European Commission and the government of the Philippines. Nevertheless, investment in education and training is decreasing in many countries despite the general recognition of its importance.

Globalization and worldwide connectivity and online services are changing the world of work as well as all our lives by offering new opportunities for innovative (formal, non-formal, and informal) learning. Currently open research and open education are two worlds not well connected that could benefit a lot from each other by using the results of open research in open education and vice versa.

This discussion and debate workshop will focus the guiding question of how to re-establish openness as default, as was the case until the 1960s. Currently, the new copyright rules and regulations are hindering the free and open usage of published resources. Researchers, authors, and publishers have not been able to resolve the issue, and most educators are struggling with the legal restrictions and potential penalties when offending copyright.

Representatives from leading international organizations such as UNESCO, ICDE, OEC, CC and ICORE are invited to share their visions and proposals and to discuss future strategies and activities with all workshop participants to foster openness of research results and educational resources, as well as to facilitate innovative learning in schools, universities and societies.

The main goal of the interactive ICORE workshop at ICDE Global Conference 2015 is the development of a declaration draft and related first activities based on the discussion of three guiding questions that will be proposed and selected from all conference participants and live twitter stream to be displayed during the whole workshop.

We hope that many interested participants and organizations will join the workshop to contribute and enrich our discussion for debating connections of open research and open education, as well as for defining first activities to achieve the overall vision of open lifelong learning and the re-establishment of openness as default!