Offene Bildungswoche is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its goal is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide, the free and open educational opportunities that exist for everyone, everywhere, right now.
We want to highlight how open education can help people meet their goals in education, whether that’s to develop skills and knowledge for work, supporting formal studies, learning something new for personal interest, or looking for additional teaching resources.
During the Open Education Week, EDEN offered several webinars, the one important for this project was:
Open Education for Civil Engagement and Democracy
Open education has a key role to play in potentiating social inclusion. As noted by the European Commission for education in general (but is particularly relevant for open education) it helps to establish common values key to such inclusion: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, respect for human rights, the rights of minorities. However, as also noted, it can be seen in most member states that there are challenges to such inclusion, namely: populism, xenophobia, divisive nationalism, discrimination, misinformation, and radicalization (that can lead to violent extremism).
In order to counter these problems, the promotion of citizenship education has been pursued over a period of years. However, the open educational content and practices necessary to teach the different paradigms of active citizenship are arguably still difficult to find. The need to respect cultural diversity is important in the educational process since there isn’t just one “model citizen”. We need, therefore, to teach and support students, especially the younger generations, to appreciate the importance of active citizenship and achieve their participative role in society as a whole. In this webinar different aspects and examples of the role of open educational resources and practices for citizenship education will be considered and how they can be potentiated in the future.
Dr. Diana Andone, project coordinator, from UPT, presented Open education for young people’s active engagement in reclaiming cultural heritage. In it, the project was disseminated and Diana presented the work UPT is doing with students as co-creators of learning material for the DigiCulture courses.
OEW is coordinated by The Open Education Global, an association of hundreds of institutions and organizations around the world that are committed to the ideals of open education. Universities, colleges, schools and organizations from all over the world have come together to showcase what they’re doing to make education more open, free, and available to everyone.
