Annual Open Education Week March 9-13, 2015
[Open Education Consortium press release] The annual Open Education Week gets underway on Monday, March 9 with the theme The World Wants to Learn. Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide. Open Education Week highlights open education efforts from around the world and provides an opportunity for educators, administrators, policy makers and learners to gain a greater understanding of open educational practices and impacts.
“Open Education plays an increasingly important role in the future of education around the world”, says Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the Open Education Consortium. “Faculty are looking for better ways to engage their students, learners are looking for just-in-time support for their studies, individuals are looking for educational opportunities to support their careers, and educational systems are looking for increased efficiency and efficacy. Open Education plays a role in all of these goals.”
“Open Educational Resources reduce the cost of education for students”, said Dr. Paul Dale, President of Paradise Valley Community College in Arizona, “But more importantly, in my opinion, it increases their engagement, it increases their purposeful time on task, and it makes their learning experience so much more enriching.”
Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge creation and sharing with 21st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.
“Open educational practices empower students to see their educational materials as something with which they can actively engage – they critique, challenge, enhance, and change them”, says Dr. Robin DeRosa, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. “The key ideas here are: student-centered, critical thinking and open. When we engage in open educational practice, we stop thinking of knowledge as information to be downloaded into the student brain, but instead think of it as knowledge to be uploaded to the world. In this way, the knowledge becomes a step in a scholarly cycle, and the student becomes a contributor, rather than a consumer, of education.”
Open Education Week (March 9-13, 2015) is a global event that seeks to raise awareness of free and open sharing in education and the benefits they bring to teachers and learners. Coordinated by the Open Education Consortium, the event showcases projects, resources, and ideas from around the world that demonstrate open education in practice. The open education movement seeks to reduce barriers, increase access and drive improvements in education through open sharing and digital formats. Open education includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education, including learning materials, course materials, videos, assessment tools, research, study groups, and textbooks, all available for free use and modification under an open license.
Website: http://www.openeducationweek.org/
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About the Open Education Consortium
The Open Education Consortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing open education and its impact on global education. We envision a world where everyone, everywhere has access to the education they need to build their futures. We seek to instill openness as a feature of education around the world, allowing greatly expanded access to education while providing a shared body of knowledge upon which innovative and effective approaches to today’s social problems can be built.
