Thanks @Paola for this discussion launcher. I’m confident we could collect a good number of examples of this already in place, wouldn’t that be valuable?
Already top of my head thinking of @wanhsu1234 's board viewpoints post on the Open Awards program at the Taiwan Open Courseware and Education Consortium. There might be too many grant programs to list (but let’s try).
And for the other recent board viewpoints post by @lena - do microcredentials have a role? And also leading to the new focus by @dajbelshaw and colleagues at the We Are Open Co-Op on going beyond credentialing to Open Recognition.
My associative links memory is also connection to the OEGlobal 2022 Lightning talk by @lcbyoung on Gratitude- Thanking Faculty for their Role in OER (recording and slides available there).
Much we could share indeed, but I’d like to introduce an idea that’s been bouncing around my head. I was fortunate this year to become a co-facilitator with @marcela of OEGlobal’s Open Awards for Excellence, and when you talk to (or listen, we have podcasts!) to past winners, the impact is very significant to them.
At the same time, a typical awards program like this is shaped like:
Public domain image found at Rawpixel shared under CC0
A nomination requires some amount of work, to write, assemble an application etc. That’s why we appreciate so much the 173 people who took this step. But a selection process then narrows what comes out, much of what goes in to a typical awards program is filtered down (hence our small effort to at least name all nominated projects and people this year).
I would like to create some kind of process that would in someways create a process above this funnel that expands the field of recognition, rather than narrows. We are hoping to brainstorm, plan some kind of new, on going recognition that could happen, maybe every month, where the process to share is very low, and a way we can spread ongoing recognition through the year.
This could then maybe feed into the more formal awards program. Can we devise something that most creates an ongoing flow of regular, microrecogniton that is part of an awards program?
I hope the Board and our members can help us plan how to do this.