The Open Government Partnership (OGP) has been an important avenue to create open educational policies on the national level. Relatively recently, an OGP program for sub-national governments (cities and regions) was launched; by November 2020, approximately 50 *new* cities will join the OGP. This creates a significant opportunity for open education advocates to “onboard” local government leaders: now is the ideal time to share how open education efforts can strengthen open governance practices ranging from increased fiscal transparency to improving civil society engagement in policy making. OGP government leaders can use open education as a tool to maximize their impact in OGP-related projects, as well as other trans-national collaborations, such as the UNESCO OER Recommendation.
Session facilitators are former government representatives who worked on national level OGP commitments in Slovakia and the US. Facilitators will offer concrete suggestions from their own North American and European-centered perspectives for OGP local work with OER. Facilitators will also invite participants to brainstorm and contribute resources to fuel future open education commitments for OGP local members. The brainstorm will address a selection of the questions such as:
What are recommended practices, stories and examples of open education policy commitments from which cities can learn? How might we inform policy conversations about open education at the local levels? What might the local governments’ action plans include? Without policy interventions at the national level, what open education-related policies at the local level might best support students and teachers? What are the recommended ways to connect the local policies with national policies? How might we best harness the connections/synergies possible between the local policies to SDGs, OGP priorities, UNESCO OER Recommendation?
This session provides an opportunity for participants to explore and actively contribute (primarily through active discussion and live collaboration on a shared document) to the development of the material that will later be shared with the leadership of the OGP Local team and shared with the cities that participate in the local program.
Because the local governments typically deal with elementary and secondary education (and not higher education), the session will focus accordingly.
Learning Outcomes: Through the session, participants will co-develop examples of OGP Local action plan commitments (template language), ready to be adopted by OGP cities. The resource list will be edited collaboratively (through Google Docs or similar). Upon additional review and revision in 2020, facilitators will share the draft resource list and example commitments with the OGP Local team by January 2021.
Director of Learning and Training, Creative Commons
Jennryn develops and manages Creative Commons training programs including the CC Certificate. She facilitates collaborative projects and partnerships for open education.
