Network of Open Organization: Who NOO what’s possible when we network and how you can leverage the extensive open resources.
Brief Abstract
For three years, leaders and staff of organizations supporting open educational resources, practices, services, pedagogies, research, data, and more have informally gather monthly to share strategies, opportunities, and achievements in open education. Strategic collaborative projects were completed which educators around the world can leverage to accelerate the adoption of Open Education.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
PRESENTERS: Gerry Hanley, Cable Green, Paul Stacey, Una Daley, Juliane Granly, and Ebba Ossiannilsson (all members of the Network of Open Organizations)
Across the globe, there are many organizations dedicated to the advocacy, advancement, implementation, and evaluation of open educational resources, practices, services, research, data, and other aspects of empowering education by opening access to information for all. Each of these open organizations brings a community of people passionate about open education and programs for transforming open ideals into individual and institutional practices for opening education. Leaders and members of these organizations would cross paths at conferences, projects, grantee meetings, government convenings and more and would reliably gain insights and energy from each other.
About three (3) years ago, Open Education Global invited leaders for open organizations to gather virtually and explore how the collective expertise and energy of the group should be channeled to possibly scale and accelerate the impacts of open education. The Executive Director of Open Education Global began facilitating an informal community of organizations and leaders in open education enterprises and we call ourselves the Network of Open Organizations. This community includes Open Education Global (previously Open Education Consortium) ,CCCOER-Open Education Global, OER Africa, Open Education Policy Hub-Lab, Creative Commons, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), ENCORE+, ICDEs Eramsus+ project, ICDE, ICDE OERAC, SPARC, SPARC Europe, eLC and ICORE, Open Universiteit, Centrum Cyfrowe, Wikimedia Foundation, MERLOT-SkillsCommons, and OER leaders at higher ed institutions (Idaho Board of Trustees, California State University Long Beach, University of Barcelona) and at other organizations.
Members of the Network of Open Organizations have been meeting virtually and discussing issues and strategies for scaling and sustaining the use of open educational resources and practices. The group chose to pursue projects as collaborative efforts that could benefit governments, large scale organizations and enterprises wanting to implement open education initiatives.
The Network of Open Organisations developed the OER Recommendation Actions Matrix in response to the adoption of the UNESCO OER Recommendation in November 2019. It outlines pragmatic activities that governments and educational institutions can consider operationalizing under the five Recommendation actions areas to support its implementation. In so doing, the Matrix contributes to the efforts of mainstreaming OER and related practices worldwide.
The second project was to write up case studies of successful, large-scale implementations of OER initiatives. Led by the OER Africa team, seven (7) projects were selected to write up as case studies, following a structured framework to make it easier for people to learn about the scope, scale, and impact of the project. The selected projects had to demonstrate how OER have been used to increase access, improve learner outcomes, and/or reduce costs and operated for at least two (2) years. The collection of case studies should reflect a diverse geographical spread of initiatives, a combination of single-institution initiatives and collaborative initiatives between multiple organizations, a mixture of initiatives led by national governments, universities, and other organizations, and where possible, there should be diversity in the sources of funding.
Our session will highlight these projects and the resources that are openly available and have participants consider how they can use these extensive resources and the expertise of the Network of Open Orgs to advance their open initiatives.