I love the idea of curated playlists coming out of the OEGlobal 2020 conference. I even heard one group talking about organizing a “Viewfest” where they’d commit a couple of hours to watching session recordings and exploring their associated resources then meet as a group to discuss what they found and learned. What a great idea!
The OEGlobal 2020 conference generated a large number of valuable resources and over 60 hours or recordings which are now available for everyone in the world to access. As an organizer, most of the sessions I attended were ones where I was a facilitator. But I’ve now managed to watch a few recordings too for sessions I could not attend in person.
Here are 10 sessions I found particularly thought provoking. There are many sessions I’ve still not had a chance to take in so don’t feel like I’ve passed your session over. I plan to explore more over the holiday break. Who needs Netflix when you have OEG Connect!
Hope you’ll post your curated playlist too so I can learn from your experience. What should I watch?
Paul Stacey’s Curated OEGlobal 2020 Playlist
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OER Utilization from K12 to Higher Education – an Asia regional aspect. One of the things I like best about Open Education Global is the way it makes visible what open education looks like in practice around the world. This keynote really helped me understand open education in Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand. The evolution from OpenCourseWare, to MOOCs, to open textbooks is fascinating.
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Open Education and Ethical Futures. This session features four of my favourite open education thought leaders discussing the most critical issues facing the future of open education. I especially appreciate their emphasis on the ethical moral, and principles of open education as a critically important and how they exemplify it through their own work and practice.
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Transformation and Empowerment: Open Education Professional Development Open education has been around now for almost 20 years. It is maturing and more and more people are interested and wanting to get involved. This round table discussion explores six different open education professional development initiatives. It’s fantastic to see this range of offerings. I’m excited by the potential for more professional development programs to emerge and for existing ones to find ways to integrate into a laddered program offering increasingly advanced skills and knowledge.
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Connecting the Opens - Open Access, Open Scholarship, Open Science, Open Education. Open education is often thought of as open educational resources with a smattering of open pedagogy. But the reality is that there are many different forms of open at play in education. This session by two remarkable leaders of international organizations shows how the many forms of open all connect and share the same underlying principles. I can’t wait to see how moving from the current siloed forms of open in education to one that builds on commonalities and synergies between them affects the entire education ecosystem.
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Grasple Stories from the Field: How educators from different institutions collaboratively create and reuse open resources. I’m a big fan of the exercises Grasple is creating and their aim to make education more accessible and personal for everyone. One of my big interests in open education currently is the social dimension and this session unpacked some fascinating ways in which educators are socially interacting, collaborating, and sharing resources. I was very intrigued by the 7 patterns of sharing they document and especially the visual way in which they depict those patterns.
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Reuse of OER Considered from Different Perspectives. A great deal of attention in open education is focused on content creation. But the promise of open education and one of its touted benefits is reuse. This short lightning talk highlights the differing perspectives of teachers and students toward reuse and in particular around assessing quality of resources and willingness to use them. This is a topic we need way more attention on.
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From Home Education to Open Education: An Experiment in Higher Education. The COVID pandemic meant that millions of learners all around the world could no longer attend a physical school. While a lot of attention has been paid to how this led to the use of online learning very little has been said about how how this constituted a form of home schooling where parents suddenly were much more involved and responsible. Home schooling has a long tradition and in this session Tim Chen shows how parent advocacy for the right to provide home schooling for their children in Taiwan led to the government passing a new law allowing experimental forms of education of which home schooling is one. Very few new laws around education are being passed anywhere in the world and one that endorses experimental learning is incredible.
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Commonwealth of Learning Open Education Initiatives and Coursera Workforce Recovery. Asha Kanwar is one of the most articulate and passionate advocates for open education that I know and the work of the Commonwealth of Learning in supporting open education across 54 commonwealth countries is phenomenal. This session is a good example of how Commonwealth of Learning uses open education in support of sustainable development goals and social justice. From open courses, to audio based MobiMOOCs, to low-cost offline virtual classrooms, to workforce recovery efforts in partnership with Coursera the Commonwealth of Learning is active and innovating across many forms of open education.
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Student Empowered Design for Open Pedagogy and Education: An eCampusOntario Student Experience Design (SXD) Lab Journey. Attendees and participants at an education conference are usually those involved in providing education (faculty, teachers, administrators, librarians, instructional designers, etc.). Everyone agrees that the purpose of education is to serve the needs of students but students and their voices are rarely part of an education conference. Sow I was delighted that the OEGlobal 2020 conference had 60 students participating. The student voice is one we need to hear and this session featuring students from eCampus Ontario is an excellent example of how students are becoming increasingly vocal advocates and enablers of open education. I love how forthright they are and critical of the lecture + textbook form of education practice. For other student voices I recommend Empowering Student Leadership in Open Education and Becoming an Open Education Influencer: The Nelson Mandela University Student Advocates’ Experience of Opening Up in Collaboration.
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Audrey Tang, Open is a global citizen’s responsibility. This is one of the most profound talks about education I have heard in a long time. Insightful, deep, and provocative this talk explores the very purpose of education, the role of the learner in education, and the unique contribution open brings. I especially appreciate the emphasis on co-creation and communities as being core to open education. Broadband is a human right. Innovation is at the edges. You must watch this!