Special Projects

As part of OE Global’s Strategic Plan 2021-2030, it is committed to Value Co-creation – aligning with partners worldwide to build, advance, and expand the use of Open Education worldwide. With this in mind, OE Global continues to work with partners to develop and launch (or just support) key focuses that ensure a viable solid sustainable future for open education.

OEGlobal welcomes expressions of interest around partnering and collaboration at any time. Below are the special projects OEGlobal has collaborated on over the years.

Current Value Co-Creations

Network of Open Organizations

The Network of Open Organisations was formed in 2019 when UNESCO adopted the Recommendation on OER, the only standard-setting instrument adopted by an International Government Organization (IGO).

The Network was initiated and coordinated by Open Education Global with the primary objective of supporting the implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation. The Network is a community of organizations and leaders in open education. Current organizations include:

Open Education Global
CCCOER-Open Education Global
OER Africa
Open Education Policy Hub-Lab
Creative Commons
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
ENCORE+
ICDE’s Erasmus+ project
ICDE
ICDE OERAC
SPARC
SPARC Europe
eLC and ICORE
Centrum Cyfrowe
Wikimedia Foundation
MERLOT-SkillsCommons,
and representatives from HEIs, and
IGOs such as COL and UNESCO.

Open Education for a Better World

OE Global has been actively involved with the Open Education for a Better World Program (OE4BW) since January 2019. Initiated in 2018 by the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Education and the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia, OE4BW is an international online free mentoring program. It supports the development and implementation of OER about topics with a social impact and addresses one or more UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Igor Lesko, from OE Global, was involved in a hub coordinating capacity guiding 12 projects and mentors from Africa, Europe, and Asia over 2019 and 2020. For more information, visit Open Education for a Better World.

Global Events

Community Building

Previous Value Co-Creations

UNESCO OER Recommendation

OE Global played an active role in drafting the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation, which was unanimously adopted on November 25 by 193 UNESCO member states at the 40th UNESCO General Conference. OE Global sees this as a unique and important milestone offering a significant opportunity to advance open education worldwide.

OE Global believes that the best way forward to ensure the successful global implementation of this recommendation is to join forces in a coalition. We see the benefits of a coalition as:

Showing through action how organizations supporting open education around the world can work together
Ensuring that each of our organizations does not duplicate efforts or offer separate, competing, redundant support
Distributing the effort to develop and deliver robust, comprehensive support across a coalition in such a way that we leverage our respective strengths and expertise
Ensuring that resources and services in support of the recommendation are high quality, comprehensive, and consistent across our organizations
Making it easier for our members and constituent stakeholders to clearly know who to get what support from by not offering separate and conflicting support
Signaling to governments, funders, and the global open education community that our organizations are working in a coordinated way to support the recommendation
Making it easier for funders to provide targeted funding by reducing the number of duplicate proposals they might get from each of us to do similar things

OE Global reached out to a trusted network of partners with an established track record of collaboratively working together. As a result of that outreach, an initial group of founding partners was formed, including (in alphabetical order):

This coalition met and collectively developed an action plan in 2020, resulting in the Network of Open Organisations (see above). The focus of the coalition is on implementation support for the Recommendation’s five areas of action:

Building the capacity of stakeholders to create, access, use, adapt and redistribute OER
Developing a supportive policy
Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER
Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER
Facilitating international cooperation
Monitoring and reporting

Open Education Policy Forum

OE Global partnered with Centrum Cyfrowe in Warsaw, Poland, and SPARC USA to develop and host the Open Education Policy Forum. The forum’s goal is to involve participants in developing an open education policy for their institution, region, or country. Starting with a two-day workshop in Warsaw, Poland, in 2019, the participants worked on their policy which they presented during Open Education Week in March 2020. Open Policy Forum continued in 2020, 2021 and 2022. For more information and to get involved, visit Open Education Policy Forum.

Open EdTech

OE Global partnered with Moodle and other education technology organizations on a working conference for every one actively building the future of education on open technology. The event was the first of its kind and brought together open software projects, government education ministries, development organizations, academics, educational institutions, and users to work towards building a solid open-source technical infrastructure to support education in the decades ahead. The inaugural Open EdTech Global took place in Barcelona in 2019. It resulted in a set of 12 guiding principles and working areas, described in the Barcelona Open EdTech Global Blueprint.
For more information and to participate, visit Open EdTech Global.