Open Education Global 2022

A little less conversation, a little more action, please! Turning SPARC Europe's report “Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education” recommendations into reality.
05-24, 11:00–11:45 (Europe/Paris), Salle I


Abstract

At the end of 2021, SPARC Europe published “Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education” (Santos_Hermosa, Proudman &Corti, 2021). This report summarises the results of a survey of European libraries on Open Education (OE) and Open Education Resources (OER) prepared by SPARC Europe in consultation with the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL). Launched in May 2021, the survey, which targeted academic librarians across Europe, garnered over 230 responses from 28 countries. Framed by the UNESCO Recommendation on OER (2019), the report ends with a list of specific actions librarians can take to progress implement it.

This is a proposal for a long workshop. It aims to encourage libraries to accelerate their support for OE by discussing and evaluating the feasibility of certain recommendations made in a 2021 survey report. We want to take full advantage of the fact that the workshop will be done in person and promote a practical, hands-on approach. It has been a long time since we had the chance to sit down and discuss OE action in depth with our peers. This workshop will allow colleagues to work together face-to-face in a relaxed yet stimulating environment. Using prompts, such as cards, and forms we aim at creating a fully interactive experience, where the participants feel comfortable taking their time to think, share and exchange ideas.

The aim of this workshop is to collect and share practical actions that librarians can take to implement what the 2021 survey report recommends starting from their own work whilst also learning from others. We hope to gather librarians -and other stakeholders around a table - with a) real actions/strategies libraries are implementing; b) new ideas, which are not still done but that can be implemented in the near future. The base is the SPARC EU Recommendations, according to the answers from 230 academic librarians across Europe. However, your answer is missing... Since your voice is also needed, join us and contribute!

How will the workshop be carried out?

  • During the event: through engaging activities and tools provided by the organizers, participants will group, discuss the recommendations from the Report, share tips/provide references to evidence-based experiences related to them. They will discuss what works and what doesn’t and produce collaborative outcomes in the form of a list of practical examples that can be implemented by other librarians elsewhere. Furthermore, participants will come up with suggestions on how to progress more quickly or easily where some of these practices are already in place. They will aim to move forward by paving the way for others to do the same and by leading by example.
    Participants will be encouraged to categorise their experiences/their ideas for future actions around action-oriented variables (looking at resource variables such as small effort vs large effort, few vs significant financial resources, necessary vs complementary roles involved, volunteers vs official tasks, addressed action area(s), actions/practice done/planned, preparation time, implementation time, etc).

SPARC Europe will use printed texts of the list of recommendations from the Report and participants will be invited to use them to share their experiences. This will serve as a SWOT Analysis (strong and weak points, opportunities, etc ) in which librarians will work on the recommendations, based on their own experiences.

  • At the end of the workshop: the outcome will be a set of recommendations enriched by examples describing the variables needed to implement them. We hope that workshop participants and readers of the recommendations will be inspired to implement these going forward.

References:
Proudman, V; Santos-Hermosa, G.; Smith, J & Ficarra, V. (2020). Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education. SPARC EU. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3903175

Santos-Hermosa, G; Proudman, V &Corti, P. (2021). Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education (2021 report). SPARC EU. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5734980

SPARC Europe. (2022). THE SKIM: Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education (2021 report). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5862319

UNESCO (2019). Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=49556&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Dr. Gema Santos-Hermosa (ORCID: 0000-0002-2776-871X) is a full time lecturer at the Faculty of Information and Audiovisual Media at University of Barcelona (Spain). Previously, she was a (part-time) lecturer at the same university and at the Faculty of Communication of the Pompeu Fabra University. She has also worked at Open University of Catalonia (UOC), as part of the affiliated teaching staff (in the doctoral school and in the degree of Information Science) and as the Research Support Training coordinator at UOC Library.

She hold a Ph.D in Information Science and Communication. Her doctoral thesis discusses the development and reuse of open educational resources (OER) in higher education. She has a series of articles about OER and Open Education published in indexed journals and several book chapters.

She is a researcher at the Center for Research in Information, Communication and Culture (CRICC) at UB and a member of the Research Group on Digital Documentation and Interactive Communication (DigiDoc) at UPF. As a researcher, she has participated in four National R&D&I Plans for Fundamental Research projects and in three European projects; focused on Open Science and Open Education. In 2012 she did two research stays at the Open University (UK) and University of Madison-Wisconsin (US).

She is member of the OER Dynamic Coalition of UNESCO, the Open Organizations network and the ENOEL (European Network of Open Education Librarians) of SPARC-Europe. She has chaired the group of experts EMPOWER Knowledge Resources of the EADTU university network (2015-2020) and has coordinated the OER action within REBIUN (Spanish network of Universities libraries) (2017-20).

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Paola Corti is the Open Education Community Manager of the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) and she supports librarians in taking action to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendation. She is also a project manager in METID - Politecnico di Milano (Italy).
Paola has been working in distance learning since 1998. She has been a passionate advocate for Open Education (OE) since 2016 developing MOOCs and OER in Politecnico di Milano. She is also an experienced and keen OER teacher and trainer. Paola has the CC certificate for Educators and CC Certificate for Facilitators to help others make open educational resources more reusable. Paola’s work tries to link social justice and Open Education. She helps bridge the gap between educators and librarians in achieving more open access to education.

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