Just published as part of the Unitwin Network on Open Education 23 good reasons… to adopt Open Education
23 good reasons… to adopt open education by Colin de la Higuera
Every year, in early March, open education (OE) is celebrated during the OE Week , promoted by Open Education Global . This is an event where groups over the world present ideas and projects related to open education.
With the help of our friends from the UNESCO Chair RELIA and from the UNITWIN network on open education UNOE , we thought it possible to contribute to the OE Week by reviewing the arguments we can use to convince people and institutions to go for open education . We then contacted friends from all continents , and asked them if they would like to contribute by presenting one of these arguments in a blog post. There were several surprises for us in the hours following the launch of our call:
The first surprise was the enthusiasm with which it was received. Within 10 hours, all the original 22 topics had been selected;
The second surprise was that our original list was a good starting point . To be fair, it had been tested in the field: we had been running activities in various countries on the issue of adopting open education, and the selection of topics had therefore gone through different rounds of practical testing. In fact, just one new proposal was made to us, which was excellent and justified that we would be talking about the 23 reasons ;
The third surprise was the variety : we have contributions proposed from 13 countries and in 8 languages . We are especially happy to have 7 proposals from EUniWell partners .
The teams in charge of the three blogs on which the articles will be initially published are really excited about this, even if they also are having to deal with some (expected) interesting difficulties, especially regarding the different ways to handle multilingualism . In the EUniWell blog we have been working on the issue of multilingualism for a while and support 8 languages . We believe that AI assisted translations can work, but we always make sure human curation takes place. In the context of the 23 reasons, we may have little time to get as many translations as we would ideally want.
Another challenge is that we wanted to reveal one reason to adopt open education per day during the OE Week. But, with the 23 articles expected, we have decided to maintain the publication of one article per day , and go for an open education month , in the spirit promoted by our friends from Quebec!
We plan to re-exploit the material later in workshops. This could well be the case for the May Open Educational Resources hands-on workshop we are intending to organize in all EUniWell universities. All the material will be under a CC-BY licence , allowing general distribution, so anyone who sees value in posting, reposting, transforming the posts is encouraged to contact us so that we can help them.
For EUniWell, we hope this operation and series of articles will make open education more visible inside the Alliance.
Join us from March 3rd to discover every day a new reason to adopt open education!
Link: https://euniwell-open-education.univ-nantes.fr/23-good-reasons-to-adopt-open-education/