Open Practices
How We Share It
Open Practices are collective behaviors and techniques that open up access to educational opportunities. These practices promote and support the use of open educational resources, technologies, and social networks to facilitate collaborative and flexible teaching and learning.
Open Pedagogy
An innovative open teaching practice that incorporates openness in several levels of the learning processes. Engaging not only in the production, use and reuse of content but also promoting effective open teaching practices.
The Agora – 2017
The Agora is a nine-week, blended, open faculty development program co-developed by the University of Guadalajara and the Justice Institute. Through hands-on studios, practical examples, challenges, and experiential learning, the program provides faculty with the tools and experience they need to plan, design, implement and share student-centered and mobile learning in their courses. The Agora creates a unique learning experience for university faculty designed to create long-term change in teaching and learning practices.
(Professional Development)
Justice Institute of British Columbia, Canada / Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico
http://udg.theagoraonline.net/
The OER Passport – 2018
Mountain Heights Academy developed The OER Passport as a professional development program that trains teachers and students on OER by completing six tasks. At the beginning of the year, each faculty member receives a physical passport and as they complete each task, they receive a stamp on that page. The OER passport ensures that all faculty engage in the production, use, reuse, licensing, creation, publishing, and sharing of content. The tasks are designed to invite students to learn about OER, how to appropriately license OER, and to co-design and publish OER along with their teacher.
Mountain Heights Academy, United States
http://ohsudev.mrooms3.net/course/view.php?id=307#section-0
Red EuLES – 2018
The EuLES Network (u-Learning Environments in Higher Education) is an interdisciplinary network created in 2010 by Professors Ana Allueva and José Luis Alejandre of the University of Zaragoza (Spain) to foster research, interaction, cooperation, and transfer of knowledge and technologies related to learning and open education. The EuLES Network and its members participate in research projects and organize activities to spread and exchange experiences, and promote the use of technologies, new resources, and methodologies in the open education and learning context. The EuLES Network continues growing rapidly and already has more than thirty members.
University of Zaragoza, Spain
The Open Patchbooks – 2019
Educators from around the world are building a community patchwork of ‘chapters’ into a quasi-textbook about pedagogy for teaching & learning in higher education. Each patch of the quilt/chapter of the book focuses on one pedagogical skill and is completed and published by different individual faculty members from any institution wanting to join in. The success of the project has lead to a follow up/companion piece known as The Open Learner Patchbook, which collects similar stories from a student perspective.
Fleming College/eCampusOntario, Canada
https://facultypatchbook.pressbooks.com/
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Open Pedagogy Fellowship – 2020
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Open Pedagogy Fellowship is an opportunity for faculty to work across disciplines to create renewable assignments centered around one or more of the SDGs. The focus is to create these assignments that can be shared with others while also making students agents of change within their own communities. The fellowship requires faculty work with others with whom they do not usually engage in learning activities. This team approach results in dynamic discourse and great discovery, all while putting students at the center of the learning process.
Montgomery College, United States
Open Collaboration
A successful environment that fosters the collective production of open resources and open practices with a shared goal. An interchange of ideas supported through technologically mediated collaborative platforms, encouraging new opportunities for people to form ties with others and create things together; encouraging diversity of goals, backgrounds and cultures. These might include communities of practice, joint project ventures, multi-institutional collaboration, multinational cooperation.
CLIx – 2019
The Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) is a technology-enabled initiative providing resources for high school students in the areas of Mathematics, Sciences, Communicative English, and Digital Literacy. CLIx is designed to be interactive, foster collaboration, and integrate values and 21st-century skills. It is a bold and innovative intervention with global relevance to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the public education systems in India. The overarching goal is to demonstrate quality at scale through meaningful use of new media and digital technologies in resource-constrained contexts.
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India
Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) – 2020
OE4BW is an international online mentoring program supporting the development and implementation of freely accessible modules and resources for online education on topics with social impact according to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Winners of a global call for OER development proposals are supported online for six months by experts in OER design volunteering as mentors. Program participants prepare a presentation for a closing event to attend a workshop on OERdesign, exchange ideas, meet other OER developers, and establish potential future collaborations.
University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia
Open Research
A research study or initiative about open education and/or related areas. A study or initiative that helps advance our understanding and demonstrate effectiveness related to challenges of the Open Education movement.
OER Knowledge Cloud – 2014
The OER Knowledge Cloud was established to identify, collect, preserve and disseminate available documents of enduring value to researchers, industry, government, scholars, writers, historians, journalists, and informal learners. It is a powerful, searchable database that offers free access to research initiatives, data, and other information on all aspects of Open Educational Resources. It contains 2769 published records by 4658 authors from 971 sources, with 1653 file archives.
Athabasca University, Canada
https://www.oerknowledgecloud.org
OER Research Hub – 2014
The Open Educational Resources Research Hub (OER Research Hub) is an Open University initiative that focuses on research designed to explore the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices and the particular influence of openness. The initiative collaborates with projects across four education sectors (K12, college, higher education, and informal), extending a research network with shared methods and results. It is looking for evidence of the impact of openness on learning.
The Open University, United Kingdom
Open Research – 2015
For two years, the Open Media Unit/OER Research Hub collaboration has conducted rigorous, tightly focused research into the use and impact of the UK Open University’s open content. This collaboration has achieved extensive demonstrable impact in informing changes to the OU’s open platforms to widen participation in higher education. The research impact has been amplified through widespread dissemination within and beyond academia. Two recent papers have been nominated for EDEN’s best research paper awards.
The Open University (UK), United Kingdom
http://oro.open.ac.uk/cgi/r/ah09mfd
Qualitative Investigation of Faculty OER Usage – 2015
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges did an extensive qualitative investigation of faculty open educational resource usage. The study was based on interviews with 60 faculty members and built upon a previous state-wide survey with 770 faculty. The results illustrate how community college faculty perceive and use OER for teaching and provide a comprehensive picture of support needs for faculty’s OER implementation.
Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, United States
Reflections on ‘critical openness’ (ROER4D) – 2016
This research paper demonstrates the interrelation between ideological, legal, technical, and operational openness through the example of the ROER4D project in which increasing awareness of the complexity and multifaceted nature of Open Research, particularly in a development context, has led to the conceptualization of a critical approach to openness.
University of Cape Town, South Africa
OWL: Open World Learning – 2016
The Open World Learning (OWL) program will offer 15 Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarships funded by the Leverhulme Trust and three supported by the Open University between 2015-2020. The scholarships will help to examine learning in the 21st century, the opportunities for openness that flow from networked digital technologies, and how they may exclude the very people who most stand to benefit from them.
The Open University, United Kingdom
http://www.open.ac.uk/iet/main/research-innovation/research-projects/owl
openTEL – 2017
The Open Technology Enhanced Learning (openTEL) is a priority research area for The Open University. It brings together researchers from across the Open University to focus on research into TEL to benefit OU learners.
The Open University, United Kingdom
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/opentel/
The Open Education Group – 2017
The Open Education Group at Brigham Young University has made significant efforts to improve research efforts related to OER. They have published more than 20 rigorous research studies, including some published in top-tier journals. They have also done a research synthesis comparing the efficacy and perceptions of OER versus traditional materials and created a resource to help OER researchers produce effective studies.
The Open Education Group at Brigham Young University, United States
Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) – 2018
The Global OER Graduate Network is a network of Ph.D. candidates worldwide conducting their doctoral research on an aspect of open education. GO-GN was established in 2013 as an initiative from the UNESCO Chair in OER at the Dutch Open University. GO-GN aims to raise the profile of research into open education, support those conducting their Ph.D. studies in this area, and develop openness as a research process. In December 2017, GO-GN was comprised of fifty-eight Ph.D. researchers registered at universities in seventeen countries, supported by a much larger number of supervisors, experts, and friends.
The Open University, UK, United Kingdom
Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) – 2018
A principal objective of the ROER4D project was to build an empirical knowledge base on the use and impact of OER from a developing country perspective. The project adopted an Open Data Initiative for facilitating reuse of the content produced by various sub-projects and network hub activities. ROER4D worked to raise the visibility of the developing-country contributions to OER and higher education studies by delivering a wide range of open resources that can be accessed, reused, and redistributed by researchers, educators, policy-makers, and anyone interested in open education.
(Open Data)
University of Cape Town, South Africa
https://www.datafirst.uct.ac.za/dataportal/index.php/catalog/ROER4D
Educational Innovation Integrated Studies – 2019
The Educational Innovation Integrated Studies open research initiative integrates studies of educational innovation in MOOCs and open repository systems. The project highlights studies carried out by researchers, master’s students, and students of doctoral programs in Mexico and Spain that participate in the Educational Innovation Research Group, the Openergy Network, and the UNESCO/ICDE Open Educational Movement for Latin America Chairs.
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
http://hdl.handle.net/11285/633012
GO-GN Research Methods Handbook – 2020
The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) released the GO-GN Research Methods Handbook. It features a methodology guide to doctoral-level research to support researchers working in open education. The Handbook is an open educational resource that also represents a fine example of open educational practice in research. Twenty-eight prominent doctoral and post-doctoral scholars contributed insights to create a resource that has enduring value for the open education community.
The Open University, UK, United Kingdom
http://go-gn.net/gogn_outputs/research-methods-handbook/
Open Policy
Creation, adoption, and implementation of an open policy, legislation, or mandate. A policy with a clear impact of public investment in the development of open knowledge through the efficient use and reuse of resources for the public good.
Impact for a Better Society – 2018
TU Delft created a strategic six-year framework for the university centered on openness.
Rather than create a separate open policy, they made openness part of the core strategy of the university to contribute to solving global challenges by educating new generations of socially responsible engineers and expanding the frontiers of the engineering sciences. Thus, the strategic framework paves the way for genuinely mainstreaming openness at TU Delft and sets a leading example for universities in Dutch HE and Europe, affirming the university’s leading position in open education.
(Open Culture)
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
https://www.tudelft.nl/en/about-tu-delft/strategy/tu-delft-strategic-framework-2018-2024/
Iniciativa Educação Aberta – 2019
Iniciativa Educação Aberta (The Open Education Initiative) is a partnership between the UNESCO Chair in Distance Education and Educadigital Institute to advance Open Education and OER as part of a digital rights agenda in Brazil and the region since 2008. Their work includes professional development, mentoring in educational policy, research, publications, repositories, and on-site and distance education. Highlights include an open course on OE/OER for more than 300 higher education personnel, an OER Guidebook for policymakers, and the “Open Education Policy Game” board game.
UNESCO Chair in Distance Education / Educadigital Institut, Brazil
Dispositivos tecnológicos para el estudiantado de la UNED – 2020
The Universidad Estatal a Distancia(UNED) project “Technological Devices for UNED’s Students,” emerged from the desire to provide a low-income population with devices t0 support their students’ learning. The joint effort between the Fab Lab Kä Träre and the Student Affairs Division at UNED uses tablets and open hardware to allow the institution to serve more people with fewer resources. In addition, these technologies are now an integral part of the scholarships offered to their students.
Universidad Estatal a Distancia, Costa Rica