Posted in 2017
OE Global 2018: call for proposals opened
As you might have seen or heard, the Open Education Consortium and TU Delft will host OE Global 2018 conference at TU Delft Netherlands between 24 and 26 April 2018. We are exited to announce that the theme will be Transforming Education through Open Approaches. The website is now live and the call for proposals is now open.
“The Open Education Global Conference is where the world meets to discuss how opening education helps achieve universal access, equity, innovation and opportunity in education. The OE Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students from more than 35 countries to discuss and explore how Open Education advances educational practices around the world.”
Call for proposals
The call for proposals enables you to submit proposals to offer ‘presentations‘, ‘panel sessions‘, ‘action labs‘ and ‘poster sessions‘, and there is a journal publication opportunity in the open access journal ‘Open Praxis’. Proposals need to fit tracks mentioned below. Learn more at http://conference.oeconsortium.org/2018/call-for-proposals/
Conference tracks:
- Open Connections
Connecting different worlds of Open, such as open access, open science, open source software; strengthening our reach and increasing impact through collaboration. - Open Education Research
Research on practices to mainstream openness in education; evidence of impact, studies of educational transformation using open modalities. - Innovation through opening traditional practices
MOOCs as an accelerator for open & online education, opening teaching practices through open textbooks, openly licensed student work as OER. - Policies & strategies for Open Education
Setting priorities and conditions for mainstreaming Open Education, designing effective policies and strategies, connecting open education policies to larger policy movements such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Open Government Partnership. - Institutionalizing Open Education
Intellectual property arrangements at schools and universities; reward and recognition systems; institutional conventions; disciplinary norms; types of in-service training for Open Education; impact on hiring practices; challenges and barriers for mainstreaming openness; openness as a tool for community outreach, enhancing leadership in open education. - Tools & Technologies for Open Education
Supporting the development and use of tools for OER production, hosting, use and remix, authoring OER, conventions for tagging OER, hosting derivative works, citation conventions for derivative works, standards for remixable formats. - Open Educational Practices/Open Pedagogy
New approaches to teaching and learning based on openness, personalization of education, OER-enhanced teaching, facilitating informal learning with open resources, course redesign with a focus on open. - Connecting Open Education to formal education
Accelerating adoption of open education, recognition and rewards for open education adoption, alignment of open education values to institutional mission, accreditation of open education, recognition of learning through open means. - Student perspectives
Student-led initiatives to advance open education and research, impact of open for students, student perceptions of open education, students as open education leaders.
Impressions OE Global 2017
The last day of the Open Education Global Conference has just gone past. So it is time to reflect on what I’ve learned those days. To start off, the conference took place in an amazing venue and the organization was very well done. Compliments to the organizers!
2017 is the year in which the Capetown Declaration of OER celebrated it’s 10th anniversary. For me, running towards the conference, this raised high expectations, expecting to see what the Open Education movement has accomplished since 2007 and to discuss what the future holds. And this did take part in the closing panel discussion on the last day of the conference, where many interesting new directions were discussed.
2 years ago, at the Open Education Global Conference in Banff, David Wiley made a plea for rethinking the movement. Back then, as I recall, he pointed out that the first period of the open movement was heavily aimed at creating and sharing OER. But although this ambition has been and still is very important, this should not be the end goal. In the end OER and Open Education are means to work towards actually transforming education, making it more accessible, more global, more effective (not only from the cost perspective) and more open. Thus, I remember him pleaing for thinking about the next step in the open education movement.
Moving from OER to Open Education in all its aspects, including MOOCs, has been an answer we saw happening already back then, two years ago.
But now, I think this year the community showed that we have listened. This year, both in the keynotes, in the research tracks, education tracks and policy presentations, such as Cable Green’s vision on next steps for Creative Commons, it struck me that Open Educational Practices and Pedagogy were central to many of the talks and discussions I participated in, or would liked to have participated in. Although definitions on these terms are still developing and so far hard to dot down – where David Wiley and Bronswyn Hegarty have already provided interesting (but not the only) viewpoints – the common ground of applying open aspects to education was clearly visible.
This provides an interesting starting point for the upcoming year. And with the current Year of Open promoting openness in all its facets, I have gotten quite excited about what is to come. Hopefully in the next year we will see not only a broader application of Open Educational Practices and Open Pedagogies, but also an expansion of our open values to collaborations with all other open fields, suchs as research, data, software, policy, etc.
It appearently proved hard to get to that point this year. Perhaps 2017 was just a bit to early and the Year of Open still needs some traction. The joint approach from open practices and pedagogy and broader cross collaborations on openness, might just hold the key to actually mainstreaming Openness in the fields we work for.
Let’s see where the movement is going. And let’s discuss more about this at the next Open Education global Conference, where we are incredibly honored to welcome you at Delft University of technology.
TU Delft Year of Open
“The world is facing challenges that our university of technology alone cannot meet.” With these words, Rector Magnificus Karel Luyben announced the TU Delft Open Science programme at the Dies Natalis 2016. Now, in 2017, the year that the Open Education Consortium has declared ‘The Year of Open’, we are taking another step forward. The aim is to raise awareness among scientists, lecturers, administrators, and students about the importance of open science.
In 2016, the focus on open science – that is, making scientific knowledge accessible online to all levels of society free of charge – led to the formulation of the open access policy and the creation of a data framework policy (in other words, policy for research data management). Events like the Open Education Week, the Open Access Week, and the launch of the open science course, helped the ideas behind open science to become more firmly established and integrated.
This year, there will be another full open science programme that you too can take part in. Examples include the Open Education Week in March, the launch of the open science course in June, the ten-year anniversary of OpenCourseWare, and the Open Access Week in October.
So keep your eyes and ears open and regularly check the website for all the great things that will be happening as part of The Year of Open.
A global perspective
The Year of Open is a global focus on open processes, systems, and tools, created through collaborative approaches, that enhance our education, businesses, governments, and organisations, organised by the Open Education Consortium. At its core, open is a mindset about the way we should meet collective needs and address challenges.
Communities around the world are bringing open practices to many different fields, such as open source software, open government, open data, and of course open education. Open represents freedom, transparency, equity and participation. When something is openly created and released, the intent is for others to use it, contribute to its development and make it better for everyone, whether that’s adding more features or information, or finding errors and fixing them (source). Learn more about the global Year of Open