10 OE Global 2021 Conference Overview
The Open Education Global Conference is the main annual venue for Open Education practitioners, policy builders and decision makers. Supporters, advocates and students from all countries come together to contribute to and benefit from the broadest view of Open Education.
Open Educational Practices are developing in all countries and have shown to be resilient in today’s extraordinary circumstances. Open Educational Resources (OER) are today at the heart of Open Education as they are what allows an open transmission of educational knowledge and the application of Open Education Practices.
In November 2019, UNESCO adopted, through its general assembly, the Recommendation on OER. This important document sets goals and landmarks to which all the signatory countries agreed.
The edition of Open Education Global 2021 & 2022 is a series of two events aimed at supporting UNESCO’s Recommendation and the Dynamic OER Coalition which has been constituted to support and advance the global agenda for open education.
The conference’s program is aligned with the Recommendation both through its purpose and its full organization: the action areas of the Recommendation are the building blocks of the conference:
- Capacity Building: Focus is on ways global open education community is advancing capacity to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER
- Policy: Focus is on ways global open education community is developing supportive policy
- Access: Focus is on how global open education community is generating effective, inclusive and equitable access to quality OER
- Sustainability: Focus is on engaging the global open education community with nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER
- International Cooperation: Focus is on engaging global open education community in international cooperation to advance UNESCO OER Recommendation
The main areas of action emphasized by UNESCO in the Recommendation are also important for the Conference; therefore, the conference is being held in such a way that inclusiveness, multilingualism and universality take full meaning.
The Open Education Global 2021 Online Conference
The Open Education Global 2021 conference, 27-Sep-2021 through 1-Oct-2021, is 100% online with presentations and activities from around the world showing the connection of open education to the UNESCO OER Recommendation.
As a global event, the online conference is designed for a multilingual and multicultural audience. The call for proposals invited sessions to be written and delivered in any of the six official languages of United Nations – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian or Spanish.
The online conference is structured around the five action areas of the UNESCO OER Recommendation.
Each day conference sessions engage the global open education community in collectively advancing the implementation of the Recommendation.The online conference program included action area webinars, pre-recorded presentations, and asynchronous interactive activities.
Each day included Action Are webinars comprised of five presentations focused on one or two UNESCO OER Recommendation action areas of the day. Webinars were also offered in different languages, including five offered in Spanish, two in French, and one each in Arabic and Chinese. Each webinar was facilitated by a session chair and also included a rapporteur.
Rapporteurs will produce reports on webinars from the online conference which will serve as inputs to the Open Education Global 2022 conference. These reports will serve as starting points to discussions from which practical recommendations will be proposed and adopted.