If we have not gone too far on our seed planting metaphor for the 2025 Open Education Awards for Excellence, please bear with our need to adjust some of the timelines for review and sending nominee certificates. Indeed, the garden is quite full and we need some more time to process the nearly 200 nominations and to build out a brand new system of review by our committee of former awardees.
We appreciate the excitement we hear in messages to the awards contact address and ask for patience as we adjust the 2025 OEAwards timeline:
- The Review Committee will start their process August 27
- All nominees should get a notification including instructions for downloading a digital badge and certificate starting September 1.
- The shortlist of finalists will be announced on September 30.
- Look for more details, but the winners will be announced the week of October 13 as part of the soon to be announced OEGlobal25 online
Look for the updates always from the OEAwards 2025 web site.
Considering Recognition
Since it’s start in 2011, the OEAwards for Excellence has recognized over 250 people, projects, and resources. We are aiming to shift the approach slightly this year in not considering nominations as being “better” than others.There are specific compelling reasons to give recognition to one person or one project, not because of scale or popularity, but how well a nominee fulfills OEGlobal’s Principles and Goals of Open Education. We also each year to where possible recognize perhaps a lesser known person or project, or a significant achievement from all corners of the open education world.
We also have been considering that submitting a nomination is an undertaking of some considerable effort. What if we had perhaps some other means of encouraging more regular, ongoing small acts of recognition? Just a way to acknowledge the efforts of someone who influences you or has openly shared a key resource/tool?
Luckily, we have a simple and fun means to do this, and in fact, it’s a previously recognized award winner.
Meet the “Hat Tip” Remixer
Now again, a metaphor enters that may not be globally known, always. The “hat tip” is an expression of appreciation most common in the Western world, and specifically with origins in the U.K. It’s also become common in online spaces often abbreviated “h/t” as a means of giving credit or acknowledgement to someone else’s ideas.
Earlier this year Alan Levine recorded a OEGlobal Voice’s podcast with Bryan Mathers, who was recognized in 2024 with an Open Education Award for Excellence in the category of Remix / Reuse /Adaptation for his Fabulous Remixer Machine.
The Remixer Machine provides a collection of models or templates of visual expressions that anyone can remix by changing the text, colors, and appearance, all without any graphic skills. In this podcast conversation, Alan and Bryan brainstormed this idea of “micro-recognition” which he has added to the Fabulous Remixer Machine as the Hat Tip remix.
From the remixer, you can select from a few different hat styles, change the colors of text and background, and add a short message of appreciation. Your remix can then be downloaded so you can share it with someone as an expression of appreciation, either privately, or publicly as a small act of recognition. Each remix has a public link and is also licensed Creative Commons CC BY-SA.
Remix Your Own Hat Tip?
So, while the OEAwards process is in motion, we invite anyone to consider creating a Hat Tip remix to send, to say an OER Librarian that assisted with your open course planning, or a student artist who generated graphics for your open textbook, or to someone who created an open source tool that has aided your work, or maybe an administrator who supported open education programs.
It’s a small gesture that is meaningful on the receiving end. So this is the ask for the time now while the OEAwards process is in motion. With the help of Bryan Mathers, we set up a special Hat Tip Remix Gallery for OEGlobal. Any Remix generated from it will be added to the collection.
Right from the sample, you can start changing the image- pick a different hat, change the colors, write your own message. It becomes a new version which is saved when you click Publish. Once published, download the image version of your hat tip.
What you do with it is up to you- it can be shared through social media or within OEG Connect, but it is also very suitable just to send directly to the person you are recognizing.
Now this is where it can expand greatly- if you receive one these hat tips, we suggest that you think about someone else you would like to extend the same kind of expression of appreciation- Remix it Forward?
Ponder as well if micro-recognition became an ongoing community act. It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to create a remix, what if it happened continuously, if we had regular acts of recognition that is not the one time per year awards program??
Make Use of and Even Wear the OEAwards25 Visuals
We hope you are enjoying the new visual design for the 2025 OEAwards reflecting the theme of planting seeds of recognition.
The logos, social media images, and background designs created by OEGlobal’s Mario Badilla are all available for download and reuse from the OEAwards Visual Design Kit, all shared under a Creative Commons CC BY license.
And you can also display the Keep Open Education Growing designs on tshirts, sweatshirts, and tote bags by ordering from the OEGlobal Merch Shop. They are even popular with dogs 😉
We hope the visuals and the hat tips keep the pulse of the awards going for you.
Share Your Hat Tips
Click on reply to share a hat tip or any ideas you care to share about micro-recognition. Or a photo of your new t-shirt!
I hope more folks read this update on the OEAwards, and more so for what I slid in as a call for ongoing acts of open recognition via a very nifty tool created for us by @VisualThinkery
Awards are a BIG recognition, they take time and effort to write a nomination, and generally focus on important significant contributions. But what about something that is easy to do to give a recognition for a smaller scale action or support by a colleague or someone else in the community? Just an expression of appreciation.
Who would you give a “tip of a hat” to? Do you have 10 minutes to spare to make a remix?
Welcome to the Hat Tip as Gratitude & Micro-recognition Remixer. You can change hat styles, colors, and add a short message. Publish, save, and share, either privately or publicly.
Here is my hat tip to @paulhibbitts for all his contributions not only creating Docsify-This web publishing tool, but continually improving it, and here, generously offering support to another person or organization interesting in making use of it.
And specially for Paul, my hat tip includes Markdown
If you send to someone, as I will do here, ask Paul to consider “hat tipping it forward” and creating a remix to thank someone else (except it can’t be me!) as a way to spread the idea.
Surely you can think of a person, team, project, heck even your favorite chatbot to give a hat tip. See for example @LauraHenderson who got the idea and remixed her own hat tip.
Note: Indeed the hats and even the idea of hat tipping may not be universally known. @IslaHF shared some examples of Zulu hats as well as Peruvian style hats with many varieties.
What kinds of hats are significant from your part of the world? I bet we might convince @VisualThinkery to maybe expand the selection.
Thanks for the very kind Hat Tip @cogdog! And with a splash of Markdown at that. What a cool idea hat tip remixes are @VisualThinkery, thank you.
Abiding by your rules I won’t nominate you back😉 but rather nominate the folks behind not one but two other open-source Markdown publishing projects that are valuable contributors to the open publishing ecosystem.
My first “tip of a hat” is to Andy Miller, the originator of the Markdown-based Grav CMS, who has also over the years helped support my efforts to further share out Grav as an option for open education and publishers through various pre-built Grav Skeleton projects.
My second “tip of a hat” is to Luffy Lu and Koy Zhuang, long-time maintainers and contributors to Docsify.js.org who have been instrumental in getting a release candidate of Docsify v5 out the door this year. Docsify does all the heavy lifting for my Docsify-This project, as the name likely implies! You can also find the friendly Docsify logo right on the home page of Docsify-This, exactly as it should be!
I hope others here will continue these awesome thoughtful Hat Tips!