The Emergence of Open School Education: The Case of Open Discovery Space Portal

Nowadays, open schooling is considered an education paradigm with increasing popularity, which focuses on the learners and offers more freedom in education outside of the physical and other types of barriers such as accessibility, flexibility, affordability and availability of teacher/tutors, classrooms, schools and educational institutions. The main elements that define Open Schooling are flexible learning, based on fully exploring the potential of ICT to improve education and training systems quality and efficiency, aligning them with the current trends on ICT in education, distant learning and life-long training. The aim of this paper is to present the current status of Open Schooling mainly in the EU, but also globally, and to identify the future trends in the field by analysing the data from the use of Open Discovery Space Platform as an Open School initiative case study. In this study, various portals, initiatives, and actors/stakeholders active on Open Schooling and Open Education are identified, classified into categories according to their content, services, and positioning in the EU school education landscape. Moreover, these open school innovation services are studied, resulting in a comprehensive overview of the current status of Open School initiatives and a discussion of the future trends in the field.