Turin, 25 October 2017
Opening Up education in South-Mediterranean countries is the Open Med Project motto.
Steering toward the adoption of open educational resources represented the focal issue stressed during the Open Training Week hosted by Politecnico di Torino from the 25th to the 29th of September that gathered more than 70 scholars and administrative staff of Palestine, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, England, and Lebanon.
The training week aimed at fostering both technical and legal expertise in people working in the educational sector.
Juan Carlos De Martin delivered the opening keynote speech, touching upon the philosophical and societal rationale for Openness, and, in his closing speech, Jim Groom set forth a metaphor linking the wholesomeness of Mediterranean diet to healthy open edtech solutions. A spotlight on open education was given then by the four Mediterranean countries which are part of the consortium. The agenda was complemented with a focus on the 5 modules of the training.
The Open Med training program didn’t end up with the Turin week and a series of 5 webinars on different topics is scheduled for the upcoming months.
The next webinar will take place the 25th of October at 6pm, and will be given by Cable Green, Director of Open Education at CC.
The webinar will provide an overview of the great opportunity coming with the combination of affordable computing and bandwidth along with the whole paradigm of openness.
Cable Green prompts to imagine a future scenario in which universal access to education won’t be a utopia any more but a concrete possibility. Further, he will deliver many examples of the transformation that educational institutions have undertaken towards openness as the default rule for the dissemination of knowledge.
The openness paradigm has always been at the center of the research and policy activities pursued by the Nexa Center and the Nexa Fellows community.
For that reasons, the Nexa Center for Internet and Society oversees the educational path of the second module of the Open Med training program on Open Licensing and Copyright in Education.
The development of this module leveraged on the legacy that the Nexa Center has accrued on a topic such as openness in research and innovation in more than ten years, starting 2003 with the translation of CC licenses into the Italian legal system.
Nexa Center commitment towards open licensing and the openness paradigm was further expressed in projects such as Selili, aimed at giving informative services and professional advice on free and open source software and open licenses; Communia, aimed at framing the general discourse on and around the public domain in the digital environment by highlighting the challenges and opportunities arising from technological innovation, cultural development, and socio-economic change; PASTEUR40A, aimed at improving coordination in developing Open Access policies that align to the European Commission’s Recommendations and Horizon2020 rules.