In 2021, the Open Education Awards for Excellence celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Every year for ten years, Open Education Global has recognized the brilliance within the Open Education sector through its Open Education Awards for Excellence. The winners of these awards represent works that encapsulate the aspirations of the movement, further inspire outstanding achievements, and add immeasurably to the shared wealth of the open education community.
Celebrating the growth, diversity, and impact across the Open Education sector, this year there are four major focuses with 16 award categories in total. Each year, the awards categories grow to ensure relevance to the community and recognize the full range of open education activities, projects, resources, and practices. This year we are excited to introduce the Open Infrastructure Award highlighting the importance of a wider ecosystem that supports open education.
At the end of September, on the last day of the OEGlobal 21 online conference, the first of of the Open Education Awards for Excellence winners were announced with the award for UNESCO OER Implementation was announced as a communal award to every one of the 294 presenters at the Open Education Global 2021 online conference for their “exemplary leadership in advancing the UNESCO OER Recommendation in their own practices”.
On the 15th October 2021, we are announcing the winners of the Open Asset category. 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 Assets Awards recognize these resources in four different categories:
1. Best OER
High-quality innovative teaching and learning materials that are openly available online for everyone to use, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. These can be presented in the form of:
- Open Course (OCW/MOOC)
- Open textbook
- Video / Simulation / Animation
- Audio / Audiobook
2. Open Curation / Repository
An exceptional collection of high-quality OER that are 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.
3. Open Reuse / Remix/ Adaptation
An outstanding example of OER reuse, remix or adaptation. This may include examples of significant iterative improvements of resources including translation and localization.
4. Open Infrastructure
Open Infrastructure is the set of technologies that enables openness. It encompasses open source tools that enable the creation of open educational resources, their use in educational context, their curation, improvement, and remixing, as well as sharing. The “infrastructure” is wider than just open-source software, though: it also includes open hardware used in education, open standards enabling interoperability, as well as other open technologies that are instrumental for open education.
The Open Assets Awards 2021 winners are:
Best OER
Chippewa Valley Technical College, United States
This is the second OER nursing textbook created by the Open RN project, published in May 2021, and funded by a grant from the Department of Education. Sixty-nine reviewers, including international students and faculty members, evaluated this OER for comprehensiveness, accuracy, relevance/currency, clarity, consistency, organization, accessibility/usability, and diversity & inclusion. The free e-book has CC-BY licensing and an optional, affordable print version is also available for purchase on Amazon and in college bookstores from XanEdu. Several learning activities with formative assessments are incorporated throughout the textbook to promote student success in their courses and on their nursing licensure exam.
- Open RN Nursing Fundamentals textbook
Chippewa Valley Technical College, United States
This is the third OER nursing textbook created by the Open RN project that will be officially published in July 2021. The project was funded by a grant from the Department of Education. Over 100 international students and faculty members registered to review this OER textbook for comprehensiveness, accuracy, relevance/currency, clarity, consistency, organization, accessibility/usability, and diversity & inclusion. The free e-book has CC-BY licensing and an optional, affordable print version is also available for purchase on Amazon and in college bookstores from XanEdu. Several learning activities with formative assessments are incorporated throughout the textbook to promote student success in their courses and on their nursing licensure exam.
Open Curation / Repository
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.
- Observatorio de Innovación Educativa
Tecnológico 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.
Open Infrastructure
Thompson Rivers University, Canada
The OpenETC provides open educational technology infrastructure – WordPress, Mattermost and Sandstorm apps – to the British Columbia post-secondary sector of 25 institutions. It operates on a community contribution model, much like a cooperative, whereby users, in exchange for the free access to the infrastructure, contribute back what they can. This might include helping out with supporting other uses, providing onboarding or documentation, or sharing best practices. The cooperative model has especially benefited smaller institutions who don’t have the resources to support ed tech tools beyond the LMS, and has been an important catalyst in fostering open practices. During COVID, the OpenETC helped several institutions pivot to emergency remote teaching by providing simple tools to faculty and supporting staff.
As a model, the OpenETC provides an alternative to a vendor or shared service model, and by providing open ed tech tools to the public higher education sector supports a shift to more critical reflection of proprietary software and data and privacy protection. Although OpenETC was established in 2017, BCcampus has more recently become an important financial supporter of OpenETC by providing funding for a 3 year pilot. This support also signals a recognition of the importance of open ed tech tools as part of the broader open education movement.
OpenETC now has over 2500 users of WordPress (including SPLOTS) and 1500 users of Mattermost, including 74 Mattermost team sites. One of the key features of OpenETC WordPress is the ability, via the “Clone Zone” to browse fully built sites and clone them with one click. This has an important benefit of reducing the time and expertise required to build a site, while also allowing the community to build on the open education practices of others. In this way, OpenETC fosters re-use in a way that requires little technical overhead or digital literacy, which is a recognized barrier in OER reuse.
Wiki in Africa, South Africa / France
A wiki platform to bridge the digital divide and teach information literacy and writing skills
WikiFundi is an open source software that provides an off-line editing environment that mimics the Wikipedia ‘on-line’ environment. It allows for teaching and content creation when technology fails, access does not exist or is too expensive, and electricity is unreliable. With WikiFundi, individuals, groups and communities can learn how to create and improve articles on a wiki, and can work collaboratively to build articles and other content. To work WikiFundi needs a small portable local server (such as a Raspberry PI) that provides a local wifi network, which editors can then connect to and work on their articles. Once the articles are finished, the end result can be transferred to an online wiki page on Wikipedia or Wikimedia project or Vikidia.
How WikiFundi can help:
WikiFundi has been designed to facilitate three distinct sectors:
• Education: as an easy-to-use teaching tool for schools and education programmes to teach how to read and analyse Wikipedia or Vikidia articles, or to teach how to create and contribute, transferring digital and academic skills. There are resources in the pack to assist students and teachers.
• Outreach: as a tool that facilitates user groups and volunteers when building the Wikimedia movement by providing a way to collectively edit in offline situations. There are resources included in the package to assist Wikimedia leads.
• Entrepreneurship: as a simple wiki platform used by small groups of digitally skilled entrepreneurs in poorly connected areas to create CVs, business plans, take meeting notes, produce reports etc..
Use Case example
WikiFundi has been used since 2017 as an essential element of the WikiChallenge Ecoles d’Afrique, a writing competition for primary schools in the Orange Foundation’s Digital Schools Network. Over 4 years, 200 primary schools from disadvantaged and mostly non connected areas have been involved and over 300 articles written by the children published on Vikidia.
Open infrastructure for sustainable OER
OER Foundation, New Zealand
Over the last ten years, adhering to their “open” principles, the OER Foundation has established a fully functioning digital learning ecosystem for collaborative development and delivery of OER enabled micro-courses based entirely on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This is a loosely coupled, component-based system assembled from “best of breed” FOSS applications that can operate at internet scale, plus software code components developed by the Foundation to “glue” the system together and provide enhanced functionally. The OERF’s digital learning ecosystem is worthy of nomination because it is: 1) eminently scalable – during 2020 the OERu provided access to more than 200,000 learners using the platform; 2) cost effective – the entire server infrastructure is provided for less than USD8500 per annum in software and infrastructure costs; 3) innovative – learners learn to learn on the internet, rather than in a single application like a learning management system; 4) suitable for developing country contexts – institutions in the developing world with constrained budgets for technology can replicate the systems using technical recipes published by the Foundation or join the OERu Outreach Partnership Programme for free to build capacity to host these tools themselves; 5) designed for collaboration and OER remix as evidenced by reuse and remix scenarios around the world.
Open Reuse / Remix / Adaptation
Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas, United States
Texas Learn OER is a set of openly licensed, self-paced modules for faculty, staff, and administrators adapted from ACC Learn OER by Carrie Gits at Austin Community College for the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas (DigiTex). (Gits created ACC Learn OER in 2018 for her capstone project for the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program.) Released in August 2020, Texas Learn OER serves primarily as an introduction to OER, including such topics as understanding, licensing, finding and evaluating, and adapting and sharing OER, and there is an opportunity to earn a certificate of completion. The modules have been peer-reviewed by both state and national OER experts and are regularly updated, and continuous improvement plans include annual releases of more significant revisions to ensure the content is relevant and up-to-date.
Because it is licensed CC BY, Texas Learn OER can be adapted for any local context; for example, shortly after it was launched, Rice University in Houston remixed it to create “Owls Learn OER.” We are even prouder that the impact of the training, in less than a year, has extended beyond Texas’ borders. These adaptations have included (but are not limited to) the “OER Starter Kit for Faculty” at Northern Virginia Community College, “Open Educational Resources: Basics and Beyond” by the Online Consortium of Oklahoma, and a soon-to-be released remix from the Michigan Academic Library Association’s OER Interest Group.
We at DigiTex, along with Gits, believe that Texas Learn OER and its adaptations are exemplary examples of Open Education collaboration and community, as well as of how the CC BY license benefits the field and higher education in general.
REBIUN (Red Bibliotecas Universitarias Españolas), Spain
The reasons that inspired us for this nomination are several:
Firstly, because it is an example of an Open Educational Resource (OER) that deals with OER: a toolkit aimed at teachers and librarians to explain how to create, use, reuse, share and implement OER into teaching and learning.
Second, because it is an example of reuse. It is an adaptation of the original OER Toolkit created by the Colleges Libraries Ontario and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). It is shared with the same license as the originating resource, CC-BY-NC. At the same time, it has been reused to generate new OER toolkits.
Third, because it is an OER co-created collaboratively between the libraries from REBIUN (the Spanish network of Universities Libraries), from a specific action dedicated to OER in the REBIUN repositories’ working group. It is made with contributions from different colleagues, who curated the resources in a very professional way and who also enjoyed doing it.
Another reason is that it is an OER in Spanish, since most of the OER is in English we found this especially important and useful for the Spanish-speaking community. In this sense, it is aligned with the OER UNESCO Recommendation of encouraging inclusive, equitable, and multilingual resources.
And last but not least…because our kit de REA has had a great acceptance and impact in the Spanish and Latin American educational environment, among teachers, librarians, and other stakeholders. It has been disseminated in several courses, webinars, and conferences, as well as institutional websites, blogs from universities, social media, etc. We have received significant interest, various questions, and demonstrations of gratitude. Some users have recognized that the Kit of REA has been useful for creating and using OER. That is the best result and the real success!
BCcampus, Canada
“25 Years of EdTech: The Serialized Audio Version” is an adaptation of Martin Weller’s “25 Years of EdTech” book into a community audiobook, published in podcast form. Each chapter of the book has been read by a different member of the open education community and was released on a weekly schedule between November 2020 and May 2021. The original 25 Years of EdTech is published by AUPress under an open license.
This project is an outstanding example of the power of OER reuse for the following reasons:
– Remixing the physical book into an audiobook has increased accessibility by providing the text in an alternate format.
– Drawing together the open education community around the reading of the text sparked the companion “Between the Chapters” podcast, providing a deeper dive and critical analysis by experts into the topic of each chapter. This has added an additional layer of richness to the original book.
– The weekly podcast release schedule, and accompanying critical analysis created a fundamentally new way to experience the book – slower and in bitesize chunks.
– Each episode of the main recording or the companion podcast also now exists as an OER available for future use / reuse.
The podcast is also hosted on open infrastructure in BC, Canada, and syndicated onto all major podcast platforms for discoverability. AUPress hosts their books on the Manifold open publishing system and has also linked to the audiobook version. The main podcast is produced by Clint Lalonde and the Between the Chapters podcast is produced by Laura Pasquini.
What to expect next from OE Awards for Excellence 2021
Open Practices Awards will be announced on Oct 30th.
Each main category will be announced until a grand finale on Dec 7th for the 10th Anniversary celebrations. Look out for the Open Practices Awards + Resilience Award announcements around Oct 30th, and the Individual Awards around Nov 15th. Join us on this celebration of open education!
Explore further:
