OpenEd20

In 2019, following the Carnegie Foundation's reclassification of Elon University as a national research university, Elon's Carol Grotnes Belk Library made growing the understanding and presence of OER on campus a chief priority. Despite some individual success with faculty receiving state-funded grants, Belk Library struggled to translate those discrete achievements into significant, widespread interest.

Unbeknownst to Belk's librarians, Elon's Student Government Association (SGA) was working in parallel to address textbook costs. However, their attempts to manage those concerns stalled due to annual membership turnover and a lack of exposure to the open education movements and their foundational precepts. A chance meeting between two librarians and a persistent SGA representative brought the two campaigns together. Combining the librarians' experience and knowledge with student enthusiasm and influence proved to be a successful formula: in the spring of 2020, Elon approved their joint proposal for a faculty OER grant program.

We offer lessons learned about earning administrative buy-in and maintaining that support; focusing student interest and enthusiasm by expanding their understanding of OER; and building multi-interest coalitions to create sustainable open education initiatives.

Learning Outcomes: Students sense the value of free, open resources; lack of support for OER may stem from an insufficient vocabulary for articulating these ideas. If educators provide that missing context, students can voice their support and faculty/staff can grow their OER coalition. Our case study demonstrates a 180-degree turn from failure to success in implementing OER initiatives when students act as co-leaders.

In 2018, GSU Associate Professor of Sociology Kathy Dolan and Assistant Professor Librarian Jennie Law were awarded an Affordable Learning Georgia mini-grant to support the creation of ancillary materials for the OpenStax Sociology textbook. This lightning talk includes discussion on the successful collaboration on the original project, the plan for ongoing stewardship of their materials, and the continual usage of the project materials in the classroom and library.

Our main topic is "Exploring Intersections and Collaborations Across Borders and Contexts". In the post-COVID world when people are separated by spatial borders even more than before due to travel restrictions, with Lecturers without borders we value and aim at reaching more transparency, openness and simplicity of collaborations across borders.

We are organising regular webinars together with Professors without borders, 15x4 science engagement groups, where various associations around the globe already participated from more than 10 countries. This fostered many across border collaborations and we hope that this session will help to foster many collaborations across borders.
https://scied.network/2020/08/03/scicomms-without-borders-video-of-the-past-webinar/

Learning Outcomes:
1. Learning about challenges of education across borders from participants from different countries.
2. Collecting ways to overcome these challenges
3. Documented brain storming of discussions btw people at the session grouped together at random in order to highlight main across-borders educational problems
4. Published white paper document with schemas and outcomes. We also make agreement of further strategies and common MOOCs or podcasts on open education across borders.

See video here: https://youtu.be/8DXuvFLTqEo

Thank you to our contributors: Sadik Shahadu, Subha Dasmollick, Annapurna Madhuri, Paul Stacey, Mahesh Koltame, Seema Sharma and Ebba Ossiannilsson.

Open education offers a opportunity for international collaborations and collective problem-solving in a world demanding more and more cooperation for solving global challenges. Isolationist approaches to education, particularly the approach of the American education system, will put the learners at a disadvantage when they enter the now globally competitive job market. Thus, open education can be leveraged both in application and practice, to garner more global perspectives for students, teachers, and societies. Open education can be used as both a tool and strategy for fostering a more comprehensive educational system. In this video we will both highlight what Open Education looks like in different countries, and hear about how peers have leveraged such experiences in their current work.

This session will highlight Open Education in various educational contexts, including from the perspectives of global peers from around the world. The facilitators will provide the contributors with minimal prompts and will consolidate their answers. The video will consist of shorts snippets from our colleagues addressing two prompts.

No, we will not be asking national governments to answer these questions; rather, we'd like to hear from peers to understand the personal experiences and popular opinions and perspectives on Open Education around the world.

Learning Outcomes: As a result of "attending" the session, people will:
1) understand more about what Open Education looks like in other countries, according to those contributing to the video.
2) learn about existing opportunities for international involvement in open education.
3) be able to articulate the current state of Open Education as a global movement and strategy for modernizing the educational systems in various contexts.