Ten years after the European Recommendation “Opening up education” and the UNESCO Declaration on OERs it is increasingly evident how strategic digital technologies can be in enhancing more accessible learning environments, but, at the same time, how a concern for equity and inclusion is crucial not to exacerbate educational and social inequalities between those who have access to quality education and those who do not (OECD 2021). As underlined by UNESCO Agenda 2030 and reaffirmed by the Digital Education Action Plan (EU-2021-2027), the quality and inclusiveness of education systems is crucial to enhance a fairer and sustainable society, social cohesion, economic growth and innovation.

These hopes and worries are at the basis of the Open Education (OE) movement (Blessinger e Bliss 2016), born well before the COVID-19 Pandemic with the aim of making quality learning accessible, abundant and customizable for all (dos Santos et al., 2016; Croft, Brown, 2020; Ossiannilsson E., 2022). Embedding digital technologies in the OE perspective could help to reach these goals and OERs (UNESCO 2019) represent one of the most iconic results of this match. But a more inclusive, equitable and sustainable educational environment is not an automatic consequence.

There are many critical issues that still need to be questioned. Among them: as teachers (and students in some cases) become themselves OERs creators, which new competences are needed (technological methodological and pedagogical) to fully realize openness and inclusiveness? How to spread shared quality standards and enhance an easier access to OERs? What do we actually mean by “inclusive education”? Indeed, even if there is a wide agreement on the importance of inclusion in theory, a large debate is still ongoing in policy and research sectors: some restrict the discourse to special-educational needs, others adopt a wider perspective, acknowledging that students fall behind at school for several reasons, most of them having nothing to do with special needs or disabilities but with the existence of the right conditions for learning (Thomas 2013 and Messiou 2016)).

This contribution questions these issues starting from the research process realized in the Open Learning for All (OLA) project, which enhanced the creation and use of qualitative and inclusive OERs in the secondary school system at European level with the following aims:

1. fostering the idea that inclusion is a matter of schools’ capacity to meet the different learners needs learners, without focusing only on specific target groups, which requires new approaches, pedagogies and practices;
2. widening accessibility and quality of OERs, creating an open repository, designing and testing OERs;
3. improving teachers’ competences in designing and implementing inclusive and quality OERs through open courses (MOOCs): using and menage digital tools, interacting with digital platforms, enhancing inclusion not just in terms of technological accessibility, but also taking into account the variety of students’ learning strategies, backgrounds, perspectives, personnel histories;
4. widening the definition of digital literacy promoted by EU (DigiCompEdu framework 2016) by including students’ and teachers’ capability to detect stereotypes and values explicitly and implicitly conveyed by educational resources