The Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) has been actively organizing and co-organizing international events to promote and facilitate academic sharing in open and innovative education for more than a decade. In 2014, we started a new annual conference series — International Conference on Open and Flexible Education (ICOFE)*. With the OUHK’s recent establishment of the Institute for Research in Open and Innovative Education, the series has been renamed International Conference on Open and Innovative Education (ICOIE).

Openness and innovation are major trends in contemporary education, influencing the whole spectrum of education institutions across the globe. Technological advancement and breakthroughs are bringing about a paradigm shift in contemporary education. Modes of learning and teaching are becoming more open and innovative in terms of time, space, curriculum contents, organization, pedagogical methods, infrastructure and requirements. This change does not only happen in open universities, but also conventional tertiary institutions, as well as schools. The rapid development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is one example that well manifests the global trend of open and innovative learning. With this background, the Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) has organized the annual conferences of open and innovative education with the following aims:

• provide a platform for sharing research, practices and views relevant to open and innovative education;

• facilitate networking and cross-institutional collaboration among researchers and educators in both open and conventional universities; and

• promote open and innovative education to enhance educational access and quality.

Building on the successes of the conference series in three previous years (2014–2016), the 2017 International Conference on Open and Innovative Education (ICOIE 2017) will be held on 12–14 July 2017 at Jockey Club Campus, the Open University of Hong Kong.