Facets of Openness in a Serious Game: Opening up Format, Content, Software and Hardware

This paper advocates the claim that open licenses and open-source software are not enough to overcome the barriers to adoption of technologically innovative Open Educational Resources for educational institutions like schools. The paper analyses the case of the 4Ts game, a game designed to support the development of teachers’ learning design skills. This case study exemplifies ways of dealing with four different facets of openness, namely format, content, software and hardware facets. The paper concludes that OERs for schools need to be flexible in terms of format and easy to amend in terms of content. Software should incorporate built-in features for personalization and localization that do not require coding skills. Hardware should be cheap and/or commonly found in schools.