Change the timing of OE Week?

Hi everyone. I’m wondering what everyone thinks about moving the dates of OE Week next year to April instead of March. Here in Australia and a lot of the southern hemisphere, this is the start of our academic year. This is the busiest time for academics, students and us librarians. So we’re never able to host OE Week events as we’re too busy to plan anything substantial, and our audience is too busy getting teaching underway for another year to even consider attending something. Even just a few weeks later would be a huge help. :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Thanks for bringing this up, Tim and I will take this to our planning team. Would last week in March give enough time?

1 Like

Later in March would work for my institution in South Carolina as well.
The first week in March coincides with our Spring Break.

Throwing my voice in to say yes, I would appreciate a change.

Somebody decided to set UN SDG Week Canada during the same week as OE Week, and even though Open Ed Week has been happening for much longer I’m struggling to compete with the resources that are supporting the UN SDGs :confused:

Thanks for your responses here and @timormsby for starting the topic. The reality is, like planning global meetings, whatever timeframe you choose will be non optimal for someone.

The thing is, we are never strict about the scheduling of Open Education Week events. The 2024 calendar has events starting in late February and ones happening well after March 8. Please feel open to choosing a week that is best for your organization.

My suggestion for going forward is to plan your own locally/regionally relevant series of activities in a week “around March” and promote it as part of OE Week as “Flinders University Open Education Week is April 9-12” or “Kwantlen Polytechnic is celebrating Open Education Week March 18-22”. We will still put your events on our calendar and we can all consider it as part of open education week.

OE Global will focus energy on promoting the traditional first week of March, and not insist any events must be that exact week but invite the world to pick their optimal week. The real goal is when and where we can to make open education visible in the world.

We cannot claim to own this week! So thanks @agrey for sharing SDG Week Canada, I am going to slip it in the calendar as it is relevant! I would say if KPU is running their own events, why not double dip and list it as part of OE Week too? It counts in my book.

So, Open Education Month?

Essentially the result, but not our intent to extend it to a month. Hey, maybe year, decade!

Again, as a distributed event, we are very happy to include activities outside the one week our organization focuses on with awareness outreach. That way organizations can choose a timing that fits their needs, not ours. The consensus is that extending the focus dilutes things.

Hope that does not sound harsh!