ICDE OERAC

The Elephant in the room

The most important insights I took away from the summit concern the elephant in the room or the attacking elephant.
The natural human response to an encounter with an elephant is fight, flight, or freeze; what should we do? Another insight was the discussion on ontological and epistemological development for open education and ethical leadership in the era of AI. See also my LinkedIn post from after the conference beginning of June 2024 

I was involved in several events myself

• ICDE Board meeting Strategy plan 2025-2028
• Panel Moderator at the session on AI creating knowledge (s), teaching and learning
• Chair and presenter of the ICDE OERAC WORKSHOP on Navigating the Future: Ethical AI Leadership in Open Education and Inclusive OER Learning
• Quality review on behalf of ICDE at University Terbula Indonesia, 2016, 2019 and now 2023. During the ICDELS24 in Geneva U Terbuak was awarded  the certificate of completion 
• Launch of the ICDE TIN Technology Innovation Network
• ICDE Global Advocacy Campaign
• ICDE Launch of the TIN, Technology Innovation Network
• Dissemination of Call for articles in Sustainability Special Issue on Sustainable Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  
  

The OER Advocacy Committee (OERAC)participated and hosted a Symposium on the mandate and work by the ICDE OER advocacy committee (Panel), at the ICDE LLLS2019 in Lillehammer, Norway. The Symposium was held 12 February 2019. see the slides here. 

The theme for the ICDE and INN Lifelong Learning Summit 2019 #lifelonglearning2019 was Lifelong learning for lifelong employability. The conference which was held in Lillehammer, Norway 11-13 February 2019, gathered some 350 + delegates from 37 countries.

Background: The speed of digitalization is constantly challenging and affecting the ways we work. These challenges require new skills and competencies which again has led to an increasing focus on and demand for lifelong learning by society. While digitalization throws up new challenges, it is also the solution to address these. Through enabling accessibility and flexible delivery of new competency training, lifelong learning can be made available to all.

Presentations and highlights are available here, and more to come. The ICDE LLLS2019 Roadmap will soon be presented elaborated during the conference and in collaboration with the delegates. Prime Minister Erna Solberg; Norway was the keynote speaker. She stressed the importance of lifelong learning for all the urgent needs for transformation change especially higher education have to take related to their role as capacity building in societies and to be an even more active stakeholder in the 21^stcentury related to their offers, services and mandate for lifelong learning for all.  This has been argued  before in several of my earlier Blog posts

Ebba Ossiannilsson, (Chair) and Jean_Marc Meunier participated and hosted a Symposium entitled, OER and OEP for access, equity, equality, quality, inclusiveness, and empowering lifelong learning. The overall topic for the Symposium was The mandate and work by the ICDE OER advocacy committee (Panel) 

OERcamp.global took place in a format called ‘BarCamp’. This unconference format invited everyone to contribute to the programme. It’s an open and participatory event, made of user-generated workshop events. The opening session of OERcamp.global started on 9 December 2021 at 1 pm UTC. We had 48 hours of sessions and plenary hours so that everyone could choose the time of the day (or night) to participate in the event. OERcamp.global comprised 114 sessions from 186 speakers. 79 sessions and 11 keynotes have been recorded. There were 1089 registrations from 87 different countries. The session hosts provide videos, slides, etc. via Sched. Videos from the keynote talks are published on this playlist on YouTube

Read also another post I wrote about #OERcamp partly published by ICDE. See slides here from the keynote session.

During the OERcamp I had two sessions, one keynote on OER-a a new social contract for learning throughout the lifespan. See also the presentation at SlideShare. I also presented the ICDE ENCORE+ and the ICDE Francophone project (LIDAfr)

My other session was with Christian Stracke and Ramesh Sharma on A Global Study on Macro, Meso, and Micro aspects of Open Education due to the COVID-19. See the recording here OERCampGlobal-A Global Study of Macro, Meso and Micro aspects of Open Education due to COVID-19 and the slides here

Why an OERcamp.global?

Let’s celebrate OER! Let’s share our knowledge, experience, and resources! Let’s get to know each other, as individuals, as organizations, globally! Let’s talk about our projects, our aims, our hopes, and also about our doubts and challenges.

OER is all about sharing – and why should we stop at geographical borders? We gathered for a 48-hour unconference with practitioners, activists, scientists, OER, and novices from around the globe. 

All areas from the UNESCO OER Recommendation was covered during the OERcamp Global 2021

An updated version of the UNESCO proposal for a recommendation for Open Educational Resources (OER), is now available. This version is based on the views of UNESCO member countries, so even from my own country Sweden, which was sent to UNESCO in January 2019. I have been involved myself as an OER expert, but also as an expert on behalf of the ICDE OER Advocacy Committee

The proposal will now be discussed at an intergovernmental expert meeting at the end of May. Thereafter, a decision to adopt a recommendation will be taken by UNESCO's general conference in November 2019. Will be of interest to follow the necessary strategies and further implementation in Sweden, but of course eve worldwide.

Conclusions in four points

1. Further to 39 C/Resolution 44, and 201 EX/Decision 9, a Recommendation has been identified as the best-suited form of standard-setting instrument in this area. It has been recognized that in comparison to a Convention, a Recommendation is more flexible and will become operational more rapidly. Despite being a statement of principles, it has the potential to raise the profile of OER collaboration to a higher political level in all Member States of UNESCO. This can play an important role in stimulating the realization of the potential of OER for accessing knowledge freely, providing quality content at no cost, helping to foster equitable and inclusive teaching and learning and supporting curriculum development at all levels.
2. Recognizing that the Ljubljana OER Action Plan is the outcome of a lengthy process of international collaboration and consensus building, the main themes of the Recommendation are drawn as a starting point from this document. Therefore, the draft Recommendation addresses five objectives: (i) Building capacity of stakeholders to create access, use, adapt and redistribute OER; (ii) Developing supportive policy; (iii) Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER; (iv) Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER; and (v) Facilitating international cooperation. 
3. A Recommendation on OER could potentially play a strong role in supporting strategic cooperation between the Member States in OER development, to minimize unnecessary duplication in OER development investments and to develop a global pool of culturally diverse, locally relevant, gender-responsive, accessible, educational materials in multiple languages.
4. Based on the present study, it is clear that a Recommendation on OER would provide a dynamic and effective solution for supporting an international collaboration in this area which is of utmost importance at a time when the usage, creation, and availability of OER has become an essential building block for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.