According to various international reports the need for education in the 21st Century will be enormous not only because of the increase of the population but mainly due to the increasing demand for lifelong learning. Moreover, as we are moving from the industrial-based to information-based economy the requirements of our education systems must respond to this change. Towards this direction, there has been proposed a number of best practices like personalized learning, problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, assessment for learning and so forth as methods that could drive the underlying educational change. The open courses and open educational resources paradigm is another hot trend that many countries around the world support as a mean for open and free education to each citizen thus contributing in making education more accessible, especially in societies where financial resources for the development of learning content is scarce. In this paper we present the development of the Open Courses Project in Piraeus University of Applied Sciences (PUAS), its unique characteristics and innovations as well as the first evaluation results after the three years of development. The project supported the development of about one hundred open courses which correspond to twenty five percent of the PUAS'courses while the engagement reached the forty two percent of the academic staff of PUAS.