Building communities and supporting practitioner autonomy through mapping the world of OER [1568] Members : #OER17

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Wed, Apr 5 2017, 3:00pm – 4:20pm

Authors: Rob Farrow, and Jan Neumann

Room: Conf. Hall

Theme: Policy & Practice

Type: Presentations

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Description

Two key goals for the OER movement include establishing a reliable model of the international impact of OER (that can be used to influence policymakers) and to find effective ways to support local and international collaboration. Thus, effectively cataloguing and mapping the world of open education is a longstanding goal of the OER movement (D’Antoni, 2012; Amiel et al., 2015; Neumann & Farrow, 2016). The OER World Map (http://www.oerworldmap.org) is a Social Education Management Information System (“sEMIS”) which aims at accelerating the development of the global OER ecosystem by strengthening the ability of the OER community to organize itself. It combines elements of a social networking platform, a business information system, a geoinformation system and a library catalogue and will contribute to mainstreaming OER by collecting and visualizing data on the growing number of actors and activities in the field of open education worldwide.

Currently the OER World Map provides databases for organisations, persons, services, projects and events. More than 650 organisations and 320 services (e.g. OER repositories, MOOC) are included. These can be filtered according to different criteria including subject, level of education, language, license and country. While each database provides special value of its own, the World Map allows to interlink different entries with another very easily, which enables the platform to provide the hitherto most comprehensive, precise and reliable picture of the global OER ecosystem. While each database provides special value of its own, the World Map allows to interlink different entries with one another very easily, which enables the platform to provide the hitherto most comprehensive, precise and reliable picture of the global OER ecosystem.

The apparently neutral act of presenting data on a map has subterranean political dimensions. The radical geography movement of the 1970s and 1980s challenged the positivist assumptions of cartography, arguing that maps often reflect implicit power structures and values, and thus the orientation they provide is rarely neutral. This presentation of the OER World Map project explores these issues in the context of the most advanced OER mapping project. Crucially, the empowerment and supported autonomy of practitioners must be supported through both design and community activity

The presentation will include the following:

An exploration of the challenges encountered in developing the OER World Map (such as deciding what data to include/exclude and how to best present this)
A description of the OER Infostelle project in Germany. This is the first example of a government funding data collection for the OER World Map. If successful, this might become a good practice example to be rolled out to other countries.
The OER Atlas 2016: A printed report including data on OER from German speaking Countries, which has been developed in cooperation with the OERde Festival (Neumann, 2016))
An overview of how the tools we have developed should be of interest to educational policymakers, including integration of the Creative Commons policy registry and linking this data to people, initiatives and outcomes
Reflections on the approach taken to community engagement and empowerment

References

Amiel, T., Soares T., & Ochoa X. (2015). Creating a map for OER initiatives in Latin America. LACLO 2014. http://laclo.org/papers/index.php/laclo/article/download/286/268

D’Antoni, S. (2013). (2013). A world map of Open Educational Resources initiatives: Can the global OER community design and build it together? Summary report of an international conversation: 12–30 November 2012.

Athabasca University. https://oerknowledgecloud.org/content/world-map-open-educational-resources-initiatives-can-global-oer-community-design-and-build-i

Neumann, J. (2016) The German speaking OER landscape in numbers. OER World Map. https://oerworldmap.wordpress.com/2016/03/18/the-german-speaking-oer-landscape-in-numbers/

Neumann, J. & Farrow, R. (2016). The OER World Map Project- Building an ‘Open Operations Room’ for the OER Community. 13^th Annual Open Education Conference, Richmond, VA. https://openeducation2016.sched.org/event/7loj/the-oer-world-map-project-building-an-open-operations-room-for-the-oer-community

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