Okay, maybe I am exaggerating on “breaking” and “exclusive” but we are sharing here in OEG Connect before anywhere else some early look into what is new and exciting for this year’s OE Week, our 13th annual worldwide celebration and awareness raising for open education. This happens this year on March 4-8.
OE Week Banner by @mario shared under a CC BY license, also available with more items in the OE Week 2024 Promo Kit
For many who participated last year (and a few of you, the 12 years before that), we expect that you have already or in the process of planning your own OE Week activities. Excellent! We are almost ready to open our new web site where you can add your events.
If you have not heard of or participated in Open Education Week, it’s a simple concept. We at OEGlobal do not make the plans for activities, you do (“you” as in the collective you of open educators everywhere). It is a distributed event.
An annual celebration, Open Education Week (OE Week) is an opportunity for actively sharing and learning about the latest achievements in Open Education worldwide.
Get basic information now from the OEweek 24 “Splash Page” at https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/ (which will be replaced soon by the new web site)
If you want to jump to an overview, we have a temporary splash page web site at the same location the new web site will appear https://oeweek.oeglobal.org that includes preliminary information and suggestions for what you can do to get ready to participate. We also provide a link to the OEWeek Promo Kit which includes our graphics that you can use in your own materials, web sites, social media, to advertise what you are doing this year.
OE Week Icons by @mario shared under a CC BY license, also available with more items in the OE Week 2024 Promo Kit
Planning OE Week Events
We are hoping to open the web site ASAP this week where you can start entering your own events. What is new this year is that event organizers log into the new site to add activities, and that allows you at any time to return to make changes if needed.
What are OEWeek Events?
That’s up to you- of course they can be presentations, workshops, guest speakers, but many more possibilities. If you need some ideas for inspiration, see the schedule from 2023 where you will find 255 things to inspire… If that’s not enough, you can also explore the archive of all OEWeek events going back to 2015.
OEWeek events can be available online (expect many webinars) but what is valuable as well are any events that are happening locally, at your institution or in your community. The idea is less online conference and more of a way to create as much attention as possible in activities happening around the world, around the clock.
OE Week Logo by @mario shared under a CC BY license, also available with more items in the OE Week 2024 Promo Kit
What Information You Will Need?
The list is not surprising, a title and description for your event, an image to represent it, the name, geographic location, web site for the organization hosting the event. You will enter dates and time in your local timezone. If your event is a webinar, you can include the web address where guests can watch or register. We welcome adding information for events in languages other than English.
Many organizations also offer an array of local events during the week (more is better!), and you can enter a single large event as well as adding details on the individual events so they show up at the appropriate times on the calendar. Part of the new web sites features is that once you enter information about the host, you do not have to repeat entering it for every event.
If you are ready and eager and willing to help us test the new form, send a direct message to me @cogdog and I will let you try the web site early.
What About the Assets? The Library?
This is in the new and different department for 2024. And readers of OEG Connect are the first to know.
In previous years we have collected Open Assets (OERs) that are housed in our own database, still available for you to explore.
But this year, we are planning to make this as well a distributed activity. The world has so many OER repositories! What we are asking this year is rather than put your assets in ours, that you make use of and contribute to the commons of global OER , by adding to ANY repository where open resources are available.
Rather than building up our own collection, the idea is to track how much growth we can generate in all OER repositories. You can either contribute a brand new OER or add an existing one to a place where it is not currently listed.
We will set up a simple form where you can register what you added and where-- the major goal, and we hope a gift to OER world wide, is to just expand the field of open content. You can choose to add to big repositories or small, ones at your institution or elsewhere.
So what you can be doing now and before the end of this month when we open this second OEWeek form, is to thinking about what OERs you might choose to make available in a new repository.
Another way you can help us out is to help develop our starting list of possible repositories we should offer as built-in suggestions.
OE Week Events Badge by @mario shared under a CC BY license, also available with more items in the OE Week 2024 Promo Kit
What Else Can You Expect?
Here at OEGlobal I am planning ti run like last year, a series of OEG Live webcasts during the week (I am looking for volunteer guest!), as well as open recording sessions of OEG Voices podcasts. You will also find our own set of events from CCCOER and OE LATAM.
We also hope you will use this OEWeek space in OEG Connect to share information, ask questions, share highlights of what you experienced during the week. You can use the DO OEweek area to conduct asynchronous activities here in OEG Connect.
We fully expect events like TUDelft’s We Like Sharing open photo contest will be back (and maybe you might decide to offer your own iteration of this award winning concept)
The social media spaces will also light up with much activity tagged #OEWeek24.
We hope you are excited and eager to be part of Open Education Week, be it contributing your own events and assets, or participating in what will be another full schedule of open activities,
And look soon for the opening of our brand new web site.
Got questions? comments? Make use of that handy Reply button.
But also, because it will have the information and web form ready for you to add your planned OEWeek events to the calendar. It does not matter if you do not have the final details ironed out, as you will have direct access to update and edit your own events.