From Open Educational Resources to an Open Learning Resource Ecosystem in the AI Era: Policy Implications for Vietnamese Higher Education

Abstract

Open educational resources (OER) expand access to and reuse of high-quality learning materials; however, their effectiveness depends on coherent institutional policies, users’ digital competencies, and mechanisms for collaborative sharing. This study re-examines the findings of a national survey on OER in Vietnamese higher education and interprets them in the context of the national digital transformation agenda and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The findings reveal a gap between the widespread routine use of digital resources and limited understanding of open licensing, weak information evaluation skills, insufficient institutional incentives, and a lack of collaborative communities. While GenAI can considerably lower the barriers to localizing, translating, and adapting OER, it also increases the demands for quality assurance, copyright compliance, and transparency about the provenance of resources. The study proposes a multi-layered OER–AI governance model with human-in-the-loop oversight and derives policy implications for developing a sustainable open learning resource ecosystem in Vietnamese higher education.