The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has just posted a draft Circular regulating the exploitation and use of open educational resources in higher education activities on the Ministry's Electronic Information Portal to gather broad opinions according to regulations.
Creating a synchronous legal corridor for open educational resources
The draft Circular regulating the exploitation and use of open educational resources in higher education activities is built on important legal bases such as: the Law on Higher Education in 2025 and related guiding documents. At the same time, the Circular specifies the orientation in Decision 1117/QD-TTg on developing the open educational resource model in higher education.
The development of the Circular aims to create a unified legal corridor for the construction, development, sharing, exploitation, development, compilation, selection, appraisal, approval, publication, sharing, exploitation and use of open educational resources in higher education; meeting the requirements of digital transformation in higher education, promoting lifelong learning and improving learners' access to knowledge" - the Ministry of Education and Training said.
For the first time, there is a national open educational resource access portal
One of the outstanding new points of the draft is that for the first time, it clearly stipulates the concepts of open educational resources, open learning materials, open licenses (or internal open licenses), open access rights, open educational platforms and the National Open Education Resource Access Portal.
The draft stipulates that open educational resources are open learning materials (including: textbooks, lectures by lecturers, reference materials, online courses (MOOCs), multimedia learning materials, open source software or learning data) serving teaching, learning, and research activities in any format and means; existing within the public domain or copyrighted but issued under an open license, allowing users to access them to retain, reuse, modify, combine and redistribute them according to the regulations in the open license.
To ensure the quality of open educational resources for higher education activities, the draft stipulates that open educational resources must meet the requirements of scientific nature, pedagogical nature, and updating nature; comply with legal regulations on intellectual property, information security and personal data protection. Training institutions must issue internal procedures and organize appraisal before announcing and putting them into official use.
Notably, the draft requires training institutions to connect, integrate and update published open educational resources on the National Open Education Resource Access Portal to form shared data nationwide, increasing the ability to share, search for and exploit learning materials between higher education institutions.
The draft also clearly stipulates the rights and responsibilities of organizations and individuals when exploiting and using open educational resources. Accordingly, users are entitled to access, exploit, share, and edit resources according to the open license; and must comply with regulations on copyright, source citation, and not use resources for purposes that violate the law or distort academic content.
The draft Circular also identifies open educational resources as one of the important foundations of digital higher education, supporting the organization of training in the digital environment, integrated into the training program, and partially used in recognition, credit conversion, certificate and diploma issuance according to regulations.
For higher education institutions, the draft requires building an open educational resource development plan; promulgating policies to encourage lecturers and students to participate in building and sharing learning materials; investing in information technology infrastructure; organizing training and fostering capacity to exploit and use open educational resources.
The draft also encourages the participation of businesses and social organizations in the development of an open educational resource ecosystem; promotes international cooperation to expand access to global knowledge resources, contributing to improving the quality of Vietnamese higher education in the context of digital transformation and international integration.
