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Special Projects

OE Global forms strategic partnerships with other organizations who share common goals and aspirations. Collaboration is a fundamental principle of open education. We achieve more together than we do apart.

OE Global welcomes expressions of interest around partnering and collaboration at any time.  Special partnership projects for 2020 include:

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 major opportunity to advance open education around the world. 

OE Global believes that the best way forward to ensure 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 do 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
  • Signalling 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 will meet and collectively develop an action plan in 2020. The focus will be on implementation support for the Recommendation’s five areas of action:

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

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 pertaining to topics both with a social impact and which address one or more UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). In 2019  Igor Lesko, from OE Global, was involved in a hub coordinating capacity guiding 12 projects and mentors from Africa, Europe, and Asia. In 2020 Igor will continue in this capacity supporting additional projects as part of the third phase of this program. For more information and to get involved visit Open Education for a Better World.

Open Education Policy Forum

OE Global is partnering with Centrum Cyfrowe in Warsaw Poland and SPARC USA to develop and host the Open Education Policy Forum. This forum is for participants who are involved with, or planning to create, an open education policy for their institution, region or country. Starting with a two-day workshop in Warsaw Poland in 2019, participants are working on their policy which they will present during Open Education Week in March 2020. A new Open Policy Forum is expected to take place in the fall of 2020. 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 everyone working to build the future of education on open technology. Open education is enabled by the Internet and digital infrastructure. This event is the first of its kind in bringing together open software projects, government education ministries, development organizations, academics, educational institutions, and users so they can get to know each other, and work towards building a strong open technical infrastructure to support education in the decades ahead. The inaugural Open EdTech Global took place in Barcelona in 2019 and resulted in a set of 12 guiding principles and working areas as described here: Barcelona Open EdTech Global Blueprint. Another Open EdTech Global is expected to take place in the fall of 2020. For more information and to participate visit Open EdTech Global.