The essence of open education is that everyone has the right to receive education for life, which means not only the openness to educational objects, but also the openness to educational ideas, educational resources and educational processes. Open education can be carried out under the conditions of distance education or face-to-face teaching, but distance education is more suitable for realizing open education than face-to-face teaching. The combination of modern distance education and open education is what we call modern distance open education. Open universities all over the world are engaged in distance education. The development goal of Radio and TV University is to build it into a modern distance education open university with distinctive China characteristics as soon as possible.

The MIT OpenCourseWare Project in the United States and the core organizations in China are pioneers in this field.

The full name of CORE is China Open Educational Resources, and the Chinese name is China Open Educational Resources Sharing Association.