Slovenia being a role model in this field is one of the reasons the country is hosting the UNESCO congress, the minister said. She sees this as an "extraordinary recognition for Slovenia and a great achievement".

According to her, open educational resources such as publicly available educative or research digital contents significantly expand access to quality education, which is what UNESCO promotes.

The idea to unite all UNESCO activities promoting publicly accessible educational resources dates back to 2002 and is in line with the goal of making education available to all.

In Slovenia several ideas were emerging at the time, so in 2006 the Education Ministry published a series of public calls for applications promoting projects like digital text books and educative material for teachers, Makovec Brenčič said.

The portal videolectures.net started evolving, the Jožef Stefan Institute started offering a lot of content and at the same time long-distance studies became widespread, she explained.

The Education Ministry now wants to connect individual providers of digital educational resources and initiatives in this field to make Slovenia a reference country, the minister said also stressing the importance of cooperation with UNESCO.

She believes the two key challenges in the field are legal constraints and the quality of the resources.

Copyrights must be protected in line with EU declarations, conventions and policies in the right way, because it is important that people have access to knowledge. Of course, educational resources must be reliable and credible, the minister pointed out.

The two issues will be the focal point of the upcoming congress, which will bring more than 500 participants from some 100 countries, including 30 ministers, to Ljubljana between Monday and Wednesday.

"We are bound by copyright to treat authors with utmost respect, but there is no clear view on this matter and there will be a lot of debate on this issue."

Slovenia for example adopted a strategy of open access to scientific resources concerning projects financed or co-financed with public funds, she noted.

In Slovenia, open educational resources are also increasingly included in the formal types of education, the minister said, pointing to the use of digital contents at kindergartens, primary and secondary schools.

Long-distance study programmes are not very widespread and are favoured by adults.

Slovenia wants to use next week's UNESCO congress to highlight its work and achievements in open educational resources, the minister said.

At the congress, Slovenia will propose that countries active in open educational resources form an alliance or a coalition within UNESCO to support and encourage each other.

She listed Germany, France, Brazil, Canada and Japan among the countries that are very active in the field.