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Digging Deep for the 2025 Open Education Awards for Excellence

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Alan Levine

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A garden shovel digging into the ground with a logo superimposed reading Dig Deep for OEAwards25

Continuing with our seeding and gardening metaphor for the 2025 Open Education Awards, we are encouraged by what we see already planted for this year’s recognition program. As you can see from the awards website, so far 108 nominations have been entered. From a quick survey, these represent people and projects in 58 countries, from Angola to Vietnam – okay, here is the full list:

Angola, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, Cape Verde, Colombia, Egypt, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gaza, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Kiribati, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Samoa, São Tomé and Príncipe, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Tonga, Türkiye, Tuvalu, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Vanuatu, Vietnam.

We are not close to done, as the awards nomination deadline has been extended to the end of your day on July 31 – this may be the most bountiful harvest of all time!

To carry the metaphor (perhaps) too far, over the second week of July, we ran a social media campaign on LinkedIn, BluSky, Facebook, X and Mastodon, inviting open educators to “Dig Deep” for nominations. When considering possible nominations, we asked the community to think of the individuals and projects that may not be widely known or come from underrepresented regions or groups around the world.

So we “dug deep” into the collection of past awardees from 2011-2024 to show that not all awards go to “big names” or well-funded projects. With the OEAwards, we aim to recognize all examples of excellence that reflect the goals and principles of open education.

Our own digging was necessary, as several projects from the early years of the Awards were no longer available on their original website or lacked sufficient descriptive information. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine was a key tool to surface our deeper digs into the past.

We share this list again to inspire you to consider who or what to add to this year’s nominations for the Awards for Excellence. If you have any updated information on past projects for which our records are thin or incomplete, please send a note to awards@oeglobal.org so we can update the collection.

There is still plenty of time to dig and plant more seeds of recognition.

Fifteen Deep Diggings for Awards 2011-2024, from A to Y

Dig into the awardees we’ve highlighted below! You can also explore them and add your thoughts, experiences and comments to the series also posted in OEGlobal Connect. Dig these!

This list accounts for only 6% of all past 254 awardees! We invite you also to dig with our OEAwards randomizer to explore past awardees.

In this final week open to nominations, we encourage you to consider nominating an open resource/asset or an open practice. This year, like most, we see people tend to think first of nominating individuals through the individual award categories.

There is just under a week left, so we hope you are now interested in digging and planting yourself and shining some attention on open education and open educators everywhere. Start your seed planting with the 2025 Nomination Guide.

Image Credit: Always Works. Never Needs Batteries or Updates flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license modified to include the Dig Deep social media graphic created by Mario Badilla for OEGlobal also shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license.

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