Status: concluded
Period: October 2015 – October 2018
Funding: in-kind
Funding organization: Erasmus +
Person(s) in charge: Antonio Santangelo and Antonio Vetrò, Eleonora Bassi
Executive summary
The project aims at building a shared roadmap and strategy concerning the Open Educational Resources with the countries of the MENA (Medium East and North Africa) region.
Background
Openness in Higher Education seems to be common sense for the equal and democratic access to knowledge. Stimulating supply and demand for high-quality OERs is essential for modernizing education. If universities really want to find more resources to invest in better teaching and research, it is essential that the open sharing of resources is encouraged. Knowledge must be shared and spread, teachers encouraged to network and collaborate on course development and institutions discouraged from fragmentation and all producing their own slight variations on the same course. Using freely available resources teachers and students can together collaborate on compiling course material and resources, opening up the classrooms to new forms of learning.
The learning experience will be greatly enhanced due to greater involvement. Before this can be realized, we need a change in attitudes towards what we mean by education, teaching and learning. We need new attitudes towards collaboration and new literacy.
Objectives
The objectives of OpenMed are:
1) to raise awareness and widen HEI participation in open educational practices and resources;
2) to define the OER Agenda for the re-use of OER at HE institutional level;
3) to define mid-term strategic roadmaps for the implementation of the OER Agenda at local-institutional level according to the local, cultural and institutional needs and strategies;
4) to teach university teachers how to use and reuse OER in a pedagogically-rich context and improve their digital competences;
5) to pilot start-up, open educational practices and offer to students flexible and up to date open contents and learning paths, with a linkage to the international community and the needs of the job market.
Results
The Nexa Center for Internet & Society and the partners of the OpenMed project has published the Compendium: “Opening Up Education in South Mediterranean Countries: A Compendium of Case Studies and Interviews with Experts about Open Educational Practices and Resources”.
This compendium, which was created also with significant contributions made by expert interviewees in international open education, delineates the key concepts and definitions associated with open education and presents eleven case studies of international open educational practices across Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Morocco, Spain, UK, North America, and South Africa. The compendium is available at: openmedproject.eu.
National forums in the MENA countries are being held starting from December 2016 to lay down the foundations of OER national strategies and an OER Regional Agenda for South-Mediterranean Universities, which has been opened to public consultation. The aim of the OER Regional Agenda is to become the starting point for the development of both policies and roadmaps at institutional level, and it will inform the training of trainers’ component of the OpenMed project. The public consultation is available at makingspeechestalk.com/ch/openmed
In July 2017 the Nexa Center for Internet and Society set up the module “Open licensing and Copyright in Education” as part of the document “D3.3: OER Training Course Content.