How to re-establish Openness as default?
Towards a global joint initiative
The vision and overall objective is the launch of a global joint initiative to re-establish openness as default as in the 60ies years of the 20th century: ICORE, the International Community for Open Research and Education (www.ICORE-online.org), invites all interested citizens and organizations worldwide sharing this visions to join forces.
As a first step, ICORE facilitated a Pre-Conference Workshop at ICDE Global Conference 2015 on Tuesday, 13th October 2015 in South Africa. This workshop debated Open Research and Open Education and their potential and impact in the societies worldwide with special focus on re-establishing openness as default.
Opening Up Education by innovations like online cooperation, MOOCs and technology-enhanced learning has achieved broad awareness and agreement supported by the UNESCO OER Declaration and new launched policy, e.g., by the European Commission and the Government of the Philippines. Nevertheless investment in education and training is decreasing in many countries despite the general recognition of its importance.
Globalisation and worldwide connectivity and online services are changing the world of work as well as all our lives by offering new opportunities for innovative (formal, non-formal and informal) learning. Currently Open Research and Open Education are two worlds not well connected that could benefit a lot from each other by using the results of Open Research in Open Education and vice versa.
This discussion and debate workshop focused the guiding question: “How to re-establish Openness as default?” as it was the case until the 60ies years of the 20th century. Currently the new copyright rules and regulations are hindering the free and open usage of published resources. Researchers, authors and publishers are not aware how to solve it and most educators are struggling with the legal restrictions and potential fees in offending copyright.
All workshop participants shared their visions and proposals and discussed future strategies and activities to foster openness of research results and educational resources to facilitate innovative learning in schools, universities and societies.
Main goal of the interactive ICORE workshop at ICDE Global Conference 2015 was the development of a declaration draft and related first activities: All workshop participants worked commonly and actively on this declaration draft that after four hours of lively discussions the declaration could be approved in consensus by all.
We hope that many interested participants and organizations will join the OE Global 2016 workshop to contribute and enrich our discussion for debating connections of open research and open education as well as for improving the declaration draft and for defining first activities to achieve the overall vision of Open Lifelong Learning and the re-establishment of openness as default!
