Workshop preparations for "Open Education 2030: Exploiting the Potential of OER for School Education"

I'm preparing for a foresight workshop on the topic of  “Open Education 2030: Exploiting the Potential of OER for School Education”. It will be organised at the IPTS in Seville - and I'm already here!

So, my IDEAL vision on “Open Education 2030” is the following:

In 2030, Open Education Resources are not only considered as content, but people and their networks make an important contribution to opening up education through better online and offline collaboration opportunities.

Here are a few words of my background and what I want to bring to the workshop.

Since 2000, I have been involved with the topic of digital learning resources, back in the day they were often called Learning Objects. I’ve worked on various aspects ranging 

• from  metadata (e.g. application profiles and multilingual vocabularies to describe learning resources, different standards) 
• to issues related with the quality of learning resources (e.g. review mechanism by experts and end-users, rating & tagging) and  
• with findability of resources (e.g. search across multi-lingual federation of repositories, recommendation systems, social navigation). 
• I’ve also extensively worked with school teachers in various European countries on the use and reuse issues around learning resources and on exchanging good practices.

With the usage issue in Europe, the idea of cross-boundary use of learning resources is a less researched area - and in my opinion, one of the most crucial one. We tend to take it for granted that school teachers can, and want to, use and reuse learning resources that are in a language other than their mother tongue is and/or originate from different countries than they do. In addition to lingual and national boundaries, there are also the local curriculum and educational/school cultures that set boundaries. We now know that some resources travel-well, meaning that they cross these boundaries more easily than others, but more work needs to be done to make sure that these resources are readily foundable and accessible to all with a good community structure around that supports the reuse in new educational contexts (see the links below for references).

As mentioned, my vision of education in 2030 relies heavily on the idea of networks, being networked and how social influence is passed through such interactions among individuals (e.g. learners, teachers). Last year, as part of one project that I managed, we published a neat booklet called “Teacher networks”. As part of the book, we also elaborated visions on how teaching profession would look like in 2025.

Some links to references:

• Travel-well criteria for learning resources http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/travel-well
• Vuorikari, R., &Koper, R. (2009). Evidence of cross-boundary use and reuse of digital educational resources. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 4(4), 51-56. doi: http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/1028
• Scenarios on Teaching profession in 2025: what does the future bring us?http://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/collaborate/modules/teaching_profession_in_2025.htm
• Booklet: Teacher networks - Today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities for the teaching profession

Inspirational videos/websites for education in 2030:

•          Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud 

•          Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education 

•          Duolingo (a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform):