How can Open Educational Practices become mainstream in Europe?
Open education is a philosophy that believes:
Everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.
(Cape Town Open Education Declaration, 2012).
Open education is a key interest in Europe and the main focus of the ENCORE+ project.
Although Open Educational Practices (OEP) have existed for over thirty years in higher education research and practice, they have remained at the margins. The reason OEP has not become mainstream in Europe is because of a lack of systemic and strategic approaches at a European policy level.
The ENCORE+ project seeks to address these gaps by engaging stakeholders from academia and business to support the development of enabling open policies in order to promote their mainstreaming and a strong European ecosystem.
In summary: “Policy will be the lever by which open practice can become sustainable and mainstream.” (Weller, 2014, p.201).
You can read more about our thoughts on open policy in our recent position paper “The Current State of OER in Europe: Going Beyond Altruism”
ENCORE+ Circles
ENCORE+ uses “Circles” to describe the key stakeholders who contribute to the European OER ecosystem of tomorrow.
Our four Circles represent overlapping communities of practice:
- Technology
- Policy/strategy
- Quality
- Innovation.
Join our policy circle
Join the conversation on open policy by coming along to our policy circle event on the 30th of September, register here.
