This year's open educational resources (OER) grantees' meeting was held across various sites at the historical and prestigious Harvard University campus. It was organised and facilitated by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, (cyber.law.harvard.edu/), a research centre at Harvard University focused on the impact of technology on society. Catherine Ngugi reports on the event.
A highly structured meeting this year ensured that grantees – and no doubt the organisers - were fully engaged throughout the week attending plenary sessions or breakout sessions and participating in cluster meetings. The focus of the meeting this year was Education – the “E” in OER – with the goal of collectively developing an action-oriented roadmap for increasing OER's impact across different educational contexts, from classrooms to informal learning settings. Nearly 150 people from Africa, Asia, Europe, New Zealand and the US attended the meeting. Building on pre-conference input from these participants, the meeting began with a presentation of a heat map of the current state of play of the OER ecosystem. This was a graphical representation of the current OER landscape, which sought to identify and reflect trends in the production, dissemination, and use of OER resources across different educational settings. The map served as a focal point around which discussions within the cluster groups focused on identifying important factors that influence the production, ubiquity, and accessibility for OER. This was followed by a presentation and discussion of the Hewlett Foundation's 2012 OER strategic goals by Hewlett team members.
Saide and OER Africa were represented by Jenny Glennie, Catherine Ngugi and Neil Butcher. Jenny and Catherine gave brief presentations on High Quality Supply and Supportive Policies respectively, under the parallel stream on Three Pillars of the OER Ecosystem, Pillars of the OER Eco System. Sir John Daniel of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and Stemenka Ulivych Trumvich of UNESCO presented “A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources”, a COL and UNESCO publication prepared by Neil Butcher. Its purpose is to provide readers with a quick and user-friendly introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and some of the key issues to think about when exploring how to use OER most effectively.
As well as participating in the main events, the team participated in various side meetings with the Hewlett Population/Health staff, colleagues from the Health OER project and grantees and staff of Hewlett's Quality Education in Developing Countries (QEDC) program. In addition, Neil and Jenny attended a one-day workshop hosted by USAID on the use of m-learning in literacy. This provided an excellent opportunity to introduce and discuss a potentially exciting possible project that uses an innovative and exciting approach to bridging the literacy gap by providing African children with a wealth of openly licensed early readers, accessible via a digital platform. Subsequent discussion also generated much food for thought regarding requirements for the success of such an initiative.
In a closing video clip participants reflected on the meeting noting:
- the strength of the community in the room;
- how OER can fill in some of the cracks in education systems;
- tensions that OER create – the desire to create one's own course rather than possibly use solutions that will save time; and
- OER development will sometimes happen on the margins, and sometimes centrally – the approaches that we take are not important, but the effectiveness is.
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