Open Education: fundamentals and approaches
The course “Open Education: fundamentals and approaches”, produced within the OpenMed project with the support of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, aims to build capacity on Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER) among universities in the South Mediterranean region.
The course targets primarily university teachers with an interest in learning more about Open Education and with a motivation to adopt Open Education approaches and OER into their teaching.
Target Audience
The course is addressed to university educators (professors, lecturers) from any discipline, with the following required characteristics:- Basic ICT skills (use of computer, email, forum etc.)
- Curiosity and willingness to learn about Open Education
- Openness to re-think and question one’s educational practice
- High engagement with individual and group learning activities
- Open to constructive feedback, respectful to others
- Willingness to work in intercultural context and awareness.
The course is available in English, Arabic and French.
Key learning outcomes
The expected learning outcomes for learners taking the OpenMed course are:
- Understand the potential advantages of adopting OER and Open Education approaches in different contexts
- Recognise relevant concepts such as OER, Open Educational Practices, open content, open pedagogy, open assessment
- Understand how content released under different open licences can be reused
- Distinguish different types of Open Licences and understand limitations in the reuse of Open Content
- Apply Open Licences to their own content
- Search for high quality OER
- Reuse and remix OER
- Recognise different types of open educational practices and initiatives.
- Understand what MOOCs are and how to produce MOOCs
- Incorporate open educational practices into their teaching and learning
- Adapt OER and MOOCs to their specific context.
Course Content
The course content is composed of five modules, which explore different aspects of openness within Higher Education.- Module 1. Introducing Openness in Education introduces the main concepts connected to Open Education such as open content, open pedagogy, open assessment. Further, it presents some rationale on why educators should use open approaches in their teaching. Finally, it presents the history of the Open Education movement and provides some information on the state of the art of OER and open approaches usage globally. During the Module some activities are proposed to make sure that learners master the main concepts and are able to make a case for openness among colleagues.
- Module 2. Open Licensing and Copyright introduces the debate about open licenses within education, presenting the most common open licenses such as Creative Commons. Further, it introduces concepts such as Open Access to research, Open Data, and Open Science. During the Module some activities are proposed so that learners can learn in practice how to openly release their content, choosing the appropriate license.
- Module 3. Opening Up Education through OER and MOOCs goes in depth on Open Educational Resources, describing what is an OER and what is not, providing examples of OER, and explaining some strategies to search for and use open content. Further, the module focuses on MOOCs by presenting their history, typologies and the debate around this kind of course. During the Module some activities are proposed on how to create share your OERs, how to search for, repurpose and remix OER, how to use existing MOOCs in your daily teaching.
- Module 4. Localising OER and MOOCs addresses the importance of intercultural communication in Open Education, focussing on personal learning environments and diversity in open learning networks and discussing how to adapt existing open resources to a different linguistic and cultural context. During the Module some activities are proposed on how to manage diversity in groups of learners, how to adapt OER to local contexts and how to define a culturally meaningful community of practice.
- Module 5. Open Educational Practices explains how to open up teaching practices and how to experiment with Open and Networked teaching, presenting examples of Open Educational Practices. Also, it provides an intro to Open Assessment and Open Badges. During the Module some activities are proposed on how to adopt open pedagogic approaches and on how to use open assessment in your daily work.