OER Regional Agenda for South-Mediterranean Universities
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.
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.
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