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OER Regional Agenda for South-Mediterranean Universities
Last update 10 Nov 2016
30 paragraphs, 64 comments
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Vision The overarching vision behind the OER Regional Agenda, is that “Opening up education and sharing academic content may lead to improved networking, collaboration and integration of HEI systems, through comprehensive development and creation of a relevant interrelated platforms of content within and outside HEIs. The adoption of OER and OEP aims to guarantee a higher accessibility to HE and to diversify the channels and means to learn and update the knowledge of learners. In briefs, Open Education can truly change higher education and make it better, more accessible and relevant, all features befitting a global knowledge-sharing society.” Strategic Recommendations Open Content & Licenses (C) C1. Encourage the use of open licenses for all educational materials produced by public institutions, recognising that governments, institutions and education authorities can generate substantial benefits by ensuring that the educational materials developed with public funds are made available under open licenses. C2. Encourage the development, adaptation, and localisation of OER in Arabic language (modern standard Arabic) and in diverse cultural contexts. Localising OER, not simply translating contents, ensures relevance and accessibility of open educational resources. C3. Promote the adoption open standards (open source), address accessibility principles and standards during the design (W3C), and the use bibliometric criteria (Metadata) when publishing OER. Open Pedagogy & Practice (P) P1. Promote open approaches to knowledge production within education, which include the use, reuse and remix of Open Educational Resources. P2. Raise awareness - also through practical experimentation - of the role of OER supporting educational transformative practices and learning innovation, to enhance the creation and conveyance of knowledge through OEP. Strategic actions on pedagogical approaches to OER should take into consideration affordances of new ICTs in relation to teaching and learning. P3. Recognise and accredit knowledge acquired through OER and OEP by creating adequate indicators and metrics to assess competences, pursuing academic quality assurance and rigour in the process of OER production and adoption. P4. Further develop empirical investigation of the pedagogical value of OER, including their impacts on formal and informal education environments. Technology (T) T1. Ensure equitable access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), as a crucial requirement in the adoption and production of OER, bridging the digital divide by developing adequate infrastructure, including affordable broadband connectivity and widespread mobile technology. T2. Incorporate openness in teachers training programmes, building capacity on the use and value of open standards to develop technical skills and competences to find, use, remix, and contribute with OER as well as to engage with and to promote OEP. T3. Support the adoption of appropriate open formats and standard to enable interoperability and compatibility between existing and new systems or solutions, and transferability of data and information between old and new systems; as open formats and standards ensure that OER can be easily created, revised, repurposed and remixed. T4. Pursue decentralised or federated solutions to knowledge management, which facilitate the creation of inter-institutional and regional OER initiatives that leverage the findability, exchange, reuse and repurpose of resources within an expanded community of users and beyond the educational institutions. OER repositories should be structured in machine-readable format as to enable proper indexing and Search Engine Optimisation of resources. Governance & business models (G) G1. Implement consistent and inclusive OER institutional policies outlining the ways in which the organisation aims to engage with OER and OEP, and develop properly-funded strategic action-plans on use, production and diffusion of OER, involving departments and people, drawing on how such involvement relates to its overarching mission and values. G2. Empower OER champions, innovators and early adopters to widespread the word to faculty and non-faculty members about the value premises and benefits of OER, through institutional and/or financial incentives and professional recognition. G3. Foster an OER culture through knowledge management practices that enable an educational paradigm by shifting towards openness and collaboration, disseminating OER and OEP within the institution and beyond and promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks, while respecting authors’ rights. G4. Develop institutional and cross-institutional flexible certification models to assess, qualify and recognise the learning outcomes of those who have learned through the use of OER and OEP, supported by a clear set of quality criteria for both content and learning processes. Collaborative models between institutions (I) I1. Recognise local innovators and networking them, pursue inter-institutional collaboration fostering the emergence of networked communities of practice around open education themes, in order to facilitate the exchange of experience, peer-collaboration, knowledge transfer, and skills development regarding the importance of OER initiatives. I2. Liaise with regional and international initiatives (i.e. consortiums, worldwide federations, open education alliances, initiatives promoted by UNESCO, etc.) that may enhance the visibility of the region in worldwide Open Education initiatives and respond to international quality assurance standards to assess and evaluate educational resources. I3. Collaborate beyond the university boundaries, recognising that Open Education is an opportunity to expand learning beyond the boundaries of traditional education, reaching wider communities, thus strengthening institutional presence and new forms of academic collaboration and recognition. I4. Encourage and promote academic research networks into open education in the Arab countries, and on the various organisational opportunities and challenges associated with the implementation and use of OER, and its impact on teaching and learning. Endorsement To endorse these recommendations, please comment here.
Comments words cloud
Short names such as HEI, OER, should be explained at the beginning of the documentWhere this quote come from ? If it is not a quote, I recommend explaining the meaning of "relevant" in this contextWhat does relevant mean ? It might be useful to cite directly Creative CommonsI see. Creative Commons in any case is a flexible license, very well customizable.What does "not simply translating contents" mean? What else should be done beyond translation ? What is relevance ?open source is not a standard. Th use (of) bibliometric criteria (metadata): metadata are a different thing from bibliometric: did you mean "bibliographic" ? If yes, maybe just bibliographic metadata is sufficient.I, personally, do not believe indicators and metrics are useful for such goal. digital skills and digital cultureI see the neither benefits nor motivations for evaluating the quality of the material (what is quality of an educational material?). This should be left internally to the institutions, if they wish to do so. This is taken from the Compendium, and I guess 'relevant' can mean a wide range of factors, for example, how staff need to be supported to problem solve ways to integrate OER with their official academic learning resources, and how content needs to be relevant and accessible to respond to a wide range of learner needs. I feel this should emphasise the importance of co-creation of such OER with studentsAlso to make sure we do not miss out the student voice; inclusivity and collaboration. We are likely to find students have lots to teach staff about access to technology and running with itAgree with the importance of this, and how universities can better support lifelong learning for all in the community, including ways in which universities can do more to make communications better with local communitiesMy comments are in response to the vision of OpenMed and that the recommendations improve practices within all our own university systems, including how openness has to go far beyond offering contents publically available. I really like this definition, I find it quite comprehensive and if I am not wrong it is not a quote as it was written for this project . Also I think relevant in this case relates with the interoperability of the OER across the partners' platforms and I agree with Katherine, OER must be relevant to a wider audienceI think I prefer how it is, because we cannot forget that not every country legally recognises Creative Commons as an alternative to all rights reserved, however, most of the countries that have agreed to the Buenos Aires Convention do accept public domain in their legislations and allow people to publish under this condition as an alternative to all rights reservedMaybe, it is referred to contextualise the object rather than just translate it, because sometimes is better to replace a foreign example by a national one to situate the students in a particular scenario I think this is key, the cultural change is the heart of OEI understand it in the way that these indicators and metrics aim at competences acquired and developed by the use and creation of OER rather than at this use, under a competencies framework such as the francophone one https://ifadem.org/sites/default/files/divers/livret-rel-v1-1-web.pdf - https://ifadem.org/sites/default/files/divers/guide_rel_web.pdfI think this is also core, but maybe it need to comprehend the possibilities of certification in the future I think this addresses my comment for T4I assume this related to ensuring that the OER produced are inclusive and consider accessibility principles so students that may have physical or health related disadvantages are not left behind because they cannot interact with the resources in an effective way I do endorse and support these recommendationsThe lack of autonomy in HE system in most of the Southern Mediterranean Countries don't help to achieve this goal. It could be necessary to add in this perspective the role on Ministry of HE to open a National Strategy. On the other hand the role of OER Champions (see my comment on G2) could help a bottom up approach probably more efficient, seeing at the situation of HE in the region I think that this is a crucial point in particular in Southern Mediterranean Countries. It could be necessary to identify other formula to give a recognition to OER Champions. It could be useful an international recognition from networks or Universities.To achieve this result I suggest that UNIMED will establish a sub-network on OER to foster the adoption of OER in Southern Mediterranean Countries. This point could be addressed by UNIMED sub-network on OER. See my comment to G3This could be facilitate by UNIMED sub-netowrk on OER. See my comment on G3Comment 1: You can consider to explore mechanisms to speed up and promote those communities who are already promoting the adoption of OER. This is helpful and a great way to find sustainability (particularly after the funding is gone). Also I encourage you to adopt strategies and mechanisms to ensure the quality of the OER. (...)Comment 2: Additional tools, services to foster curation or crowdsourced improvements are always positive forms to multiply and enlarge the OER movement. Open resources doesn’t mean good resources, being open is a good way to go if you want to learn from others! congrats for the work done! @cristobalcoboI think empahsis shouldn't be on platforms or content, but on practices. Thus, I would suggest rephrasing to something like this: The overarching vision behind the OER Regional Agenda, is that “Opening up education and sharing academic content as widely as technically possible may lead to improved networking, collaboration and integration of HEI systems, through comprehensive development of learning opportunties available to individuals and communities both within and outside HEIs.I would say "The adoption of OER and OEP aims to widen participation in HE, diversifying the range of learning experiences provided by universities to society, so citizens can have access to more opportunities for continuous education and life-long learning."Beyond the adoption of Open Licences, I think it would be important to encourage universities and educators play an active role in advocating for intelectual propery legislation reform in their countries, where needed, to make sure that suitable copyright exceptions (e.g. fair use) are in place, so educators have the freedom to use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes without restrictions that unfortunately are applied in so many countries. An example of activism to reform copyright directive in EU is this campaign by Communia https://rightcopyright.eu/The notion of "affordances" is rather problematic for different reasons; I would suggest not using it. Alternatively, something like this could be included: "Strategic actions on pedagogical approaches to OER should take into consideration practices emerging in the context of networked teaching and learning and, more broadly, digital cultures."In terms of quality assurance we could encourage the development of peer-review mechanisms. I agree with Lorna that context is essential and will determine the usefulness of resources.The point here is to encourage the development of empirical research so a cumulative body of knowledge on OER/OEP can inform future practice and, ideally, help theorise openess in education.Would substitute "the value of open standards" with Open Educational Practices instead. I would take out the phrase "technical skills" too. When thinking of capacity building I believe it is important not to donwplay the importance of values and pedagogical principles.As indicated by the recommendations included in the compendium: "Clarity about the justi cation for the provision of high-quality OEP and OER in HEIs is required". Therefore, I would suggest starting this section with the suggestion that HEI interested in adopting OEP make explicit what they want to achieve by doing so and how it fits within their overall institutional mission.Perhaps "diverse" would be a better word than relevant?Agree with Javiera. Better to leave this this as "open licences" as this includes public domain. Agree that local contextualisation of content is critical if OER are to meet the requirements of a diverse range os users. Need to be more explicit about what is meant by open standards here. Don't confuse open standards with open source. Also while metadata is important for resource discovery, *requiring* the creation of metadata can be a barrier to the release of OER. Ideally you want a mix of automatically captured metadata and user generated metadata that can grow dynamically as the resource is used. Agreed. Co-creation is important.Assessing competence as a result of use of OER is very different from assessing quality in the production of OER. I think that the importance of quality assuring OER is often overstated. Similarly, quality concerns are often used as an excuse not to engage with OER. When it comes to OER it is the context of use that is critical. E.g. A good quality OER can be used in an inappropriate context producing poor results. Perhaps there needs to be something in here about digital and information literacy?Building awareness of the value of openness into teacher training programmes is critical. We haven't had a great deal of success with open content standards for OER tbh. In reality, it's the use of common document formats and web standards that tends to facilitate the resuse of OER and open content. This is good. It's also very useful to share OER through common media sharing platforms and applications. E.g. As well as sharing content through institutional repositories, share it through social media platforms too. Yes, this is a really good idea.Yes, understanding copyright and licensing is critical here. See comment on P3 above.Agree with both these comments. Quality is important when it relates to diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility, less so when it relates to an abstract notion of academic quality. This is all about widening participation, fostering social inclusion, and extending the benefits of education. No need to cite CCNo need to add "and in diverse cultural contexts"Missing two "of" in this sentence.Probably better to be more clear is stating how it will be done?Probably the involvement of the ministries of HE will help if we are looking for National policies. The Universities in Morocco are almost autonomous. I do not know about the other countries, they may comment on this.Probably get in touch with ALECSO may help in promoting OER in the Arab Countries.OER is a train going forward and all the Universities and Educational Institutions are going to take soon or later. OpenMed Project is helping to take this train in our region.The issue of free educational resources seems to be increasingly the quality of resources. OERs are not only images but can also be courses, textbooks, educational software, etc.Governments must find ways to foster diversity and local choices while establishing and guaranteeing the use of open and interoperable standards on media, software and content (open source - open source or open source, Open access - free access to knowledge, open knowledge - free sharing of knowledge and knowledge ...). Effective access to the multitude of resources available to users and the affirmation of the pedagogical freedom of the teacher, who can construct his own learning scenarios on the basis of curation solutions rather than to undergo a tool, a support, imposed and not relevant coThanks