OpenEd20

This talk was pre-recorded. The presenters were available for Q&A afterward via Zoom immediately afterward.

The concept and ideas behind open education can only strive if sustained by a strong community of practitioners, and being continuously introduced to newcomers in a welcoming environment. OERcamps, a series of barcamps for practitioners of Open Education across all sectors and levels of experience provide just that. A strong base is provided for getting to know and sharing experiences on OER and open education. We will discuss our experiences with OER community-building events run in different formats including traditional workshops, unconferences, hackathons, and other alternative formats that have taken place over the past 8 years.

The OERcamps in Germany started in 2012 as an annual unconference. In the last years they have grown to more than 10 events per years, several formats, a book, a collection of CC BY licensed materials created by a community of practitioners.
We are building upon experiences that have been acknowledged by a UNESCO report on OER-related activities in Germany which stated: “Since OER activities are mostly driven bottom-up, there has been a need for sharing questions, experiences and materials between players, who have been isolated in their own institutions. These players found opportunities for sharing in cross-sector events and communities. Especially the barcamp/unconference format turned out to fit tremendously well developing a strong German OER community.” (Orr, Neumann, Muuß-Merholz 2017, 8). Our findings, driven by more than 8 years of experience in the field, show that cross-sectoral dialogue provides sustainability as it shows relevance of concepts such as OER and Creative Commons to a variety of communities.

OERcamps are events with participants from all sectors of education and can be transferred to all sectors. They follow open educational practices by means of participants and hosts creating content under a CC BY license, providing individual learning paths, and sharply reducing hierarchies. We want to share our experiences elaborating on the differences and commonalities of the formats.

We encourage our audience to build upon our experiences by hosting their own barcamps as excellent opportunities to foster peer to peer learning and build sustainable, diverse communities. To further promote this format, we will briefly introduce and invite to improve the translation into English of our openly licensed book and material on “how to barcamp”.

Learning Outcomes:
Attendees will learn how the unconference format barcamp works, in general and adapted for the OERcamps. They will know what learning goals can be supported for individual learners, for communities of learners and for a OE network. Sharing our experiences is meant to be an invitation and encouragement to try and use the format for p2p learning within your own communities. We will also share a book, that is currently available in German and as a draft translation to English (CC BY).