OpenEd20

Open education policymaking is a key area covered by the 2019 UNESCO Recommendation on OER, which invites member states to "develop or encourage policy environments, including those at the institutional and national levels, that are supportive of effective OER practices".

The OE Policy Hub (a new project of the OER World Map) is being developed to support activities being undertaken around the world to implement the Recommendation, especially those related to policymaking, cross border cooperation and monitoring. Following the approach of the OER World Map, the Hub aims at aggregating and connecting available information for the benefit of educational policymakers, policy advisors and researchers. The core element of the Hub is the OER Policy Registry, a collection of policy documents which was started by Creative Commons in 2015. One of the challenges of the project is to extend the data collection process to the activities leading up to, and triggered by, the publication of initial policy documents. Another challenge is to identify mechanisms to evaluate policy impacts, to support benchlearning.

The Policy Registry currently includes around 200 policy documents from all educational sectors and levels classified by a comprehensive metadata schema. The Hub aims to go one step further by providing a curated collection of tools and resources as well as a database of experts within the field of OE policy.

The Policy Hub is now collaborating with the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER), a growing consortium of U.S. Community and Technical Colleges committed to equity and student success through the adoption of open educational practices, policy, and resources. CCCOER is a regional node of OE Global. Through its Regional Leadership for Open Education (RLOE) initiative, CCCOER aims to collaborate across institutional and state boundaries to find solutions for issues impacting OER adoption in statewide programs and in large multi-institution systems. The collaboration with the Policy Hub aims to explore the feasibility of documenting and storing state-level policies and guidelines within the Policy Hub platform. Through partnering with U.S. practitioners, the Policy Hub team will develop the functionality, usability and relevance of the platform for the global OE community. This presentation will outline the core elements of the project, summarize key lessons learned so far, and sketch planned next steps.

Learning Outcomes:
Participants will learn about the OE Policy Hub as a new service for policymakers, advocates and researchers and how it contributes to the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation. They will have grasped the different functionalities of the platform and how to use it. Also they will have an awareness of the challenges and opportunities involved and be able to participate in further discussions about the Hub's future development.