Just a few hours ago, we closed the door on the nominations for the 2026 Open Education Awards for Excellence with a record 225 seeds of recognition planted by the Open Education community (if anyone needs a bit more time, contact us via awards@oeglobal.org; we have a backdoor to add any nominations by the end of this week).
As usual, there was a big flood of nominations over the past few days, with most arriving in the last two weeks. I was excited to scan them as they came in, especially noting ones from countries we have not seen represented before.
Now we are in the phase of processing the nominations, preparing the versions our reviewers will read, as well as assigning them to our 2026 Review Committee. Note that we are still adding committee members to the roster, now at 60 reviewers, including 46 previous awardees, 5 OEGlobal Board members, and, new this year, nine representatives of OEGlobal member organizations.
Committee members review a set of nominations and enter their evaluations throughout July, aiming to share our shortlist of semi-finalists in mid-August.
But first, we want to share some numbers on this year’s nominations.
- In total, we received 225 nominations, 22 of which were for the same person or project, leaving 203 unique nominations in consideration.
- By category, these include:
- 93 Individual Award nominations (a few were for groups of people)
- 81 Open Asset Award nominations (“what we share”)
- 51 Open Practice Award nominations (“how we share”)
- Nominations represent people and projects in 48 different countries including Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Palestine, Peru, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen.
- Almost half the nominations were self-nominations. To me, this underscores the lack of recognition for our work, but I’d like to hear what others think.
- There were 18 nominations representing community colleges, a strong showing representing the influence of the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER).
- We made an extra effort to encourage Open Education Global member organizations to have a strong presence in the nominations, resulting in 43 nominations of people and projects from OEGlobal members.
- Our OEGlobal Advocates (formerly known as Individual members) are visible in 3 nominations, but more significantly, Advocates submitted 14 nominations, demonstrating their role in contributing through action.
This is just the first look at all the seeds of recognition that have been planted–now we will organize them in the greenhouse. Stay tuned to see what emerges next in August, when we will share details of all nominees, as this is the program’s major goal. Shortly after, we will release the shortlist of semifinalists.
Stay tuned to the progress via the OEAwards website and everywhere OEGlobal is on social media. Watch as these nominations grow from seeds, to saplings, to trees…