Education For All

Ten years of open education luminaries from around the world

Compiled and written by David T. Kindler, Marcela Morales, Paul Stacey. Cover by Mario Badilla.

At the end of 2021, Education for All was written and published in celebration of Open Education Global’s 10th Anniversary of OpenEducation Awards for Excellence.

The book was written as a milestone that marks the major achievements of the incredible, intrepid, and determined leaders over a decade, and their collective efforts to advance Open Education.

You can also hear from some of the people and projects detailed in the book. For the 10-year celebration, previous award winners shared the impact of the awards on their careers and where they are now.

Read the preface

Education for all is a bold, audacious statement. But that is the very goal of open education.

Can you imagine a world where access to education materials is free? Where teachers and learners have the right to reuse, revise, remix, localize and translate those materials? Where copies of textbooks and course materials can be retained without cost? Can you imagine a world where teachers and learners co-create education together? A world where learners engage in assignments that generate global public goods benefiting everyone?

You may say this isn’t possible, but open educators around the world have been doing this for years. Building on the work of luminaries such as those featured in this book, open education has grown into a global movement transforming education.

Open Education Global has acted as a steward and enabler of this global open education movement since 2008. In partnership with its hundreds of members worldwide and the global open education community, Open Education Global strives to ensure everyone, everywhere, has access to high-quality education.

Starting in 2011, as part of its stewarding role, Open Education Global has provided annual recognition to outstanding contributions in the global open education community, recognizing exemplary leaders, distinctive Open Educational Resources, and open projects and initiatives. As part of the 10th anniversary of these awards, OEGlobal is publishing this Education For All book collecting all ten years of award winners into a single volume. This book is a celebration of their achievements. We plan to update this book each year as a living document.

Each year Open Education Global opens up nominations for awards to the entire global open education community. Open Education Global’s Board of Directors selects individual award recipients. The other award categories are evaluated and set by a peer review committee comprised of past award winners and other open education leaders worldwide. Historically the awards are presented each year at Open Education Global’s annual conference. For this tenth anniversary year, we are organizing a special celebration of the awards separate from the conference. Open Education Global operates and maintains an Open Education Awards for Excellence website where information on awardees can be found, including links to their profiles, projects, and resources.

We hope Education For All inspires you. We hope you’ll reach out to award winners and thank them for their outstanding work. We hope you’ll explore and learn more about the many great resources, projects, and initiatives that have received awards over the years. And most of all we hope you will get involved with open education and help make education for all a reality.

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OEG Voices – Latest Podcasts

OE Global Voices

Welcome to the home of podcasts produced by Open Education Global. These shows bring you insight and connection to the application of open education practices from around the world. Listen at podcast.oeglobal.org

We are pleased to return to our series that introducse you to members of OEGlobal Board of Directors. In this episode, we take you to Nagoya, Japan, for a conversation with Takaya Yamazato, who joined the board in 2024. Listen in to learn more about Takaya’s background, motivations, and vision for open education. You will also hear right in the opening music a fascinating insight into his many talents and his research into the micro details of one of the most iconic paintings.

As professor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Nagoya University, Takaya’s specializes in wireless and visual light communication and also leads Nagoya University’s OpenCourseWare initiative, working with faculty to publish and enhance course content. He describes how their OCW effort are much more than uploading content aimed at supporting materials to “preserve a legacy of teaching excellence.”

We offered Takaya the option to reply to our questions in his natural language, but he went beyond that in replying in both English and Japanese. He shared his responses in notes as a PDF we are sharing as a download, which is well worth looking at because Takaya added photos to show key locations near his location in Nagoya, a beautiful photo of him as a child, and examples of his open education achievements.

Side by side photos of Takaya Yamazota sitting in his office and Alan Levine in his home library. — In the OEGlobal Voices studio with Takaya Yamazota (left) and Alan Levine (right).

You find many inspiring and global level viewpoints from Takaya:

We believe that this is a message that will bring back the way of education from the bottom up. The education that a person needs now is to grow people who are able to do the right thing. We must grow people who are not just for efficiency, profit, or national gain, but also for the good of the world.
Open education has the potential to provide a space for that reflection. It can create opportunities for ethical reasoning, global dialogue, and personal transformation, not just academic advancement.
Takaya Yamazota

Episode 84 Transcript Download

Notes on This Episode

We are pleased to offer this conversation with Takaya’s voice heard in both English and Japanese and offer a transcript of the English portions. Unfortunately the Descript editing tool we use was unable to process the dual languages, so we lack the usual listen option with the transcript and its GenAI summary.

The episode required additional editing in Audacity to add Takaya’s audio and we used MacWhisper to obtain a transcript of his responses in English. But we do offer as a bonus the full musical track that Takaya shared so we could we use in the episode’s introduction and closing. You should listen to the full episode to appreciate the story behind the music.

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 84

diverse regions and disciplines, all united by the belief that education should be freely available and socially meaningful.
It’s not just about strategy, it’s about values. And it’s given me hope that open education can help build bridges where politics cannot.
Takaya Yamazota

Nagoya University https://en.nagoya-u.ac.jp/
- Nagoya University Motto 勇気ある知識人 — courageous intellectual via Wikipedia
Takaya Yamazota (OE Global Board profile)
- Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Nagoya University)
- Nagoya University OpenCourseWare (NUOCW)
- YLAB – Yamazota Laboratory (Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Nagoya University)
The Secret of the Eyes of Mona Lisa (2024, The Review Policy and Current Status of the IEICE Transactions)

Italian researchers discovered the letters “LV” hidden in the Mona Lisa’s pupil, unseen for centuries, and only revealed thanks to modern technology with very precise microscope lenses.
Similarly, in telecommunications, the LDPC code was overlooked for decades before being rediscovered and becoming fundamental to today’s wireless standards.
And these examples remind us if we evaluate ideas only by today’s capabilities, we may miss tomorrow’s breakthrough.
That’s why our OCW is designed not just to present knowledge, but to inspire, reinterpretation, and rediscovering. I believe open education should be an invitation not just to learn, but to look again with new eyes.
Takaya Yamazota

Our open licensed music for this episode is “Ceramic Feeling” recorded from a live performance by Takaya’s band “Rough Diamonds” and is shared under a Creative Commons By Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.