Celebrating Open Education Week by Welcoming Richard West to OpenScienceLab
We take advantage of Open Education Week 2026 to welcome Richard West to UC3M as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. Open Education Week is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement, organized by Open Education Global. Its goal is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. And we are excited to announce Dr. West’s presence during this week, as his work exemplifies the very spirit of open education.
About Richard West
Dr. Richard West is a professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University in the United States, and is visiting UC3M this semester as a Fulbright Scholar. His research expertise is in open education and open microcredentials/badges. He has created several popular open textbooks in the Edtechbooks.org platform including:
With David Wiley, he is the co-author of the 5Cs of Open Education Infrastructure framework, which defines the key characteristics of open education and articulates current opportunities for open education through generative AI.
He sees open education as having a reciprocal relationship with open science, where according to West:
“Open science can provide students with stronger and more current reading materials while also providing students the opportunity to reproduce and re-analyze research as open renewable assignments that are more engaging and that produce more productive learning. In return, open pedagogical practices can incorporate student work in creating open science that contributes back to the research community.”