Posted in March 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.