Open to Change: OEGlobal Executive Director search now on!

In February, the OEGlobal Board announced the intention of current OEGlobal Executive Director, Paul Stacey, to begin a year-long process to transfer his skills and knowledge to a new Executive Director. In partnership with the global recruitment agency Mission Talent, the OEGlobal team is excited to share the next phase in this process – the call for applications is now out!

Be at the forefront of the open education movement. Drive positive change for education across the globe. Guide a constantly innovating community of educators. 

About the Role

The new Executive Director will provide strategic vision and guidance to the organization and oversee the continued implementation of the 2021-2030 strategic plan: Open for Public Good. As part of the role, the Executive Director will lead a small, globally-dispersed team and provide an inclusive and caring management style to support diverse staff, members, and key stakeholders worldwide. The Executive Director will communicate with current donors while developing and executing a fundraising strategy and advocating to represent the Open Education Community before a wide range of stakeholders worldwide. 

Duties and Responsibilities:

Leadership

  • Implement the recently developed strategy for 2021-2030; 
  • Support the organizational vision and mission in accordance with the new strategy;
  • Identify challenges and opportunities to advance and support OEGlobal’s mission;
  • Act as the key spokesperson and thought leader for the organization, including giving speeches, workshops, and presentations at international conferences and meetings around the world;
  • Develop and maintain partnerships and strategic relationships with partner organizations, donors, governments, and international agencies;
  • Model and support a culture of care within the organization and the community;
  • Demonstrate the highest standards of integrity, inclusiveness, and transparency.

Operations

  • Develop operational plans in support of OEGlobal’s 2021-2030 strategic plan: Open For Public Good;
  • Oversee the efficient and effective operation of the organization;
  • Oversee the technology and infrastructure used by OEGlobal to ensure efficiency and productivity of operations;
  • Manage human, financial, and other resources to achieve and comply with  organizational objectives, including the development of talent and the overall organization growth strategy;
  • Mentor, manage and support a small, high performing team:
    • Identify opportunities that strengthen cross-organizational collaboration and teamwork;
    • Model collaboration, effective decision making, creativity, innovation, and learning;
    • Build a caring culture of diversity and inclusivity across cultures and languages;
    • Maximize team building, virtually and in periodic face-to-face meetings;
  • Ensure the organization’s operations and policies comply with all applicable laws, including registration, annual tax filings, and labor law compliance;
  • Liaise with the Board of Directors, including meeting preparation, communications, and agenda-setting.

Planning and Fundraising

  • Develop and execute new strategies to provide base OEGlobal revenue stream and fundraising efforts in close collaboration with the Board of Directors;
  • Identify key funders and potential donors;
  • Write proposals and draft reports aligned with funder goals and funded initiatives;
  • Cultivate strategic and mutually beneficial relationships with foundations, donors, corporations, and other key stakeholders;
  • Ensure effective financial stewardship and long-term fiscal sustainability for the organization.

Skills and Experience

  • International leadership and management experience, preferably in a small nonprofit;
  • Understanding of open education landscapes around the world;
  • Track record of leading successful collaborations with nonprofit organizations, donors, and governmental and intergovernmental organizations;
  • Experience with organizational and strategic planning; 
  • Solid financial management and fundraising experience;
  • Highly developed cross-cultural communication skills, respect for diversity, and ability to lead multicultural and globally distributed teams;
  • Excellent speaking and writing skills in English. Additional language is highly desirable;
  • Creative problem solving and adaptability to respond to and anticipate developments related to openness in education;
  • Strong public speaking and representation skills.

Open Education Global’s Culture 

OEGlobal’s culture is rooted in the principles and practices of “openness”. 

The culture is shaped by its vision and mission:

  • Promote, support and advance open education around the world.
  • Believe in empowerment through education. 
  • Envision a world where everyone, everywhere has access to the high-quality education and training they desire; where education is seen as an essential, shared, and collaborative social good.

Transparency is OEGlobal default position.

Be the next CEO of @OpenEdGlobal – Be at the forefront of the #openeducation movement. Drive #positivechange for education around the globe. Guide a constantly innovating community of educators. Interested? Apply now https://mis.tl/oeg-ed

OEG Voices – Latest Podcasts

OE Global Voices

Welcome to the home of podcasts produced by Open Education Global. These shows bring you insight and connection to the application of open education practices from around the world. Listen at podcast.oeglobal.org

OEG Voices 076: Purvi Shah on Storyweaver

In this episode we take you to Bangalore, India to hear about a remarkable publisher, Pratham Books and its Open Education for Excellence Award winning platform Storyweaver, core to Pratham’s mission of a book in the hands of every child in the country, published in that child’s mother tongue.

We welcomed in the studio Purvi Shah, Senior Director of StoryWeaver & Strategy to tell use the story of Storyweaver, which was recognized with a 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Repository category. At this time, StoryWeaver offers now over 64,000 stories in more than 370 languages spoken around the world, and offers a place for anyone to contribute images, new translations, and also age and subject specific teaching resources. All of this came about from a bold commitment in 2004 from Pratham Books to embrace open licensing for their published storybooks.

StoryWeaver web site with menu items Read, Translate, Create, Resources, and Discover. One of the rotating banner displays a graphic style image of a teacher reading a book to her students with text: ”Storyweeaver in School, For Educators- We've worked with teachers so closely over the years that we've built these resources to be of real help. You'll find this section packed with stories, themes, activities, and more - all carefully ordered by grade and reading level.From language acquisition and reading comprehension, to textbook concepts and ideas, we'll help you nurture the joy of reading among all your students.”
https://storyweaver.org.in/

Enjoy the enthusiasm in Purvi’a voice as she shares the missions and global reach of StoryWeaver, as well as sharing examples of her favorite titles. And we appreciate the serendipty, than when Purvi offered to read a selection of a favorite story, from among the 60,000 titles in StoryWeaver, the one she chose was What Will Today Bring? authored by someone we know well here at OEGlobal, University of Leeds open educator Chrissi Nerantzi.

We also want to thank Sreemoyee Mukherjee from Pratham Books who joined us in the studio and was instrumental in coordinating this conversation.

In This Episode

FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

In this episode of OEGlobal Voices, host Alan Levine engages in an inspiring conversation with Purvi Shah, a key member of the StoryWeaver initiative by Pratham Books in India. StoryWeaver, a community-driven digital platform, earned the 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Curation Repository category.

Key Highlights:

  1. Embracing Openness: Purvi discusses the organization’s decision to adopt open licensing to reach their mission of putting a book in every child’s hand. This shift from a traditional publishing model to an open platform allowed the community to create and translate stories, leading to the birth of StoryWeaver.
  2. The Genesis of StoryWeaver: The platform was launched on International Literacy Day in 2015 with 800 stories in 24 languages. Today, it boasts an impressive collection of 60,000 stories in 370 languages, serving as a vast repository of multilingual and multicultural stories.
  3. Innovative Features: StoryWeaver includes unique features such as “read-alongs,” which combine audio, video, and same-language subtitling to aid language learning and literacy. The platform also offers structured resources for teachers, such as thematic book lists and STEM programs.
  4. Translations and Impact: Purvi shares stories about the extensive translations available on the platform. “Rani’s First Day at School” has been translated into 138 languages, demonstrating the community’s active participation. She also narrates heartwarming anecdotes about how these stories have impacted children and teachers around the world.
  5. Community Contributions: The discussion highlights how users can contribute by translating stories or creating new ones using the platform’s vast library of images and easy-to-use creation tools. Purvi shares examples of innovative projects inspired by StoryWeaver, such as a literacy program developed in Mexico.
  6. Future Goals: Looking ahead, Purvi emphasizes the importance of expanding the depth of stories in each language and leveraging the community’s strengths to ensure that every child can access a book in their mother tongue.

Alan and Purvi’s conversation encapsulates the essence of open education and the incredible work being done by the StoryWeaver team to foster literacy and inclusivity. The episode concludes with a recommendation to explore StoryWeaver and an acknowledgment of the upcoming Open Education Awards.

Tune in to OEGlobal Voices to dive deeper into the world of StoryWeaver and the transformative power of open education.

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 76

How can we work with the communities to increase the depth of languages? So that could be a potential future milestone. We were just discussing this in office the other day that it’s so interesting that while the platform has 370 languages and that’s a milestone in itself, but the real milestone is that for that one child reading the first book in their mother tongue is really the milestone.

We hit that milestone almost every day because every day a child is discovering a book in their mother tongue for the first time. That milestone will never get old, I think. And some of the other sort of milestones [has] been just not being a platform where we allow for stories, but say, when we created this whole different platform, the white label StoryWeaver for Room to Read in Indonesia and that helped kickstart their own platform called Literacy Cloud.

That was a pretty important milestone because whatever we have learned, we could empower other organizations. to build off our investments, our learning, in countries that they work with.

Purvi Shah on StoryWeaver’s milestones


Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Fairytale Story by Serge Quadrado  licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The image of the reading octopus in this episode’s artwork is part the StoryWeaver web site, an illustration credited to Measa Sovonnarea.

Finally, this was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast, part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our showsWe have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descriptbut our posts remain human authored except where indicated otherwise.