For announcement October 15, 2021 meet winners in another of the four categories of the Open Assets Award.
Open assets are what open education initiatives produce and use, tangible goods (usually digital) with educational purpose and value. Open assets are produced, curated, and distributed in ways that make them freely accessible, usable, and improvable by others.
The Open Curation / Repository Category
An exceptional collection of high-quality OER presented after a curation process. More than merely collecting content on a specific subject, strong curation involves carefully selecting content and evaluating it for a specific purpose. Presenting it in a meaningful and organized way that can then be customized and re-shared for future users.
The winners are…
Open.Ed Collection of Geoscience Outreach OERs and more on TES
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Since 2015, the University of Edinburgh’s Open Education Resource (OER) Service has collaborated with Geoscience’s Outreach (GO) course, where students create educational projects with community clients, to curate an exceptional collection of high quality OERs into an accessible collection on the TES platform. This curated collection now consists of 59 OERs, packaged for teacher’s ease, on wide ranging scientific topics for ages 3-18. Covid-19 lockdowns and home-schooling illustrated the importance of the broad reach of this collection with downloads increasing 60% in 2020.
The GO course mainstreams OER creation and open community engagement within the curriculum, providing students with an opportunity to gain experience of science outreach and public engagement. Outstanding student projects are selected by course organisers and passed to the OER Service who collaborate with Geoscience staff and our summer Open Content Curator Interns to further develop and package the resources into high quality educational material. The OERs are also aligned with Experiences & Outcomes in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) for ease of teacher mapping to educational needs. Newsletters are sent out to Scottish school networks each year to update teachers on these available resources.
Since 2016 our employment of undergraduate summer interns has been crucial to the success of curating GO student projects into outstanding OERs, while providing our intern students with valuable work experience. Each with insights for engaging audiences, streamlining templates, editing and repackaging resources, and providing feedback for the GO course workshops which have been implemented and increased the quality of student projects.
We are proud that this collection actions the University of Edinburgh’s vision purpose and values; to discover knowledge, make the world a better place, and ensure our teaching and research is diverse, inclusive, accessible to all and relevant to society.
Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education
TecnolĂłgico de Monterrey, Mexico
Since 2014 we have been providing open educational resources. Our products range from daily news, a weekly newsletter, in-depth reports, interviews, webinars and podcasts. Our themes lay at the intersection of education, innovation and technology. With over 4 million pageviews per year on our websites, 530 thousand followers in social media, and 217,000 subscribers to our newsletter; we strive to inspire educators and around the world to make a difference in their communities by using our freely available content.
