ENCORE+ Innovation Events in 2022
This (hot) summer has seen the first opportunities for the ENCORE+ project to meet with members of our stakeholder communities face-to-face!
The first conference came in April at OER22 in London, UK. OER22 is the foremost open education conference in the UK and Ireland and was run as a hybrid event with one day in person and two days online. Orna Farrell and myself ran a workshop here focused around the different stakeholder groups (technology, innovation, quality, policy/strategy) for OER and invited delegates to share their visions and requirements for the progression of open approaches into education and training. Slides from this event (including the participation outcomes) are available from https://www.slideshare.net/robertfarrow/oer-ecosystems-of-tomorrow-oer22.
The second came soon after with Open Education Global in Nantes, France in May 2022. This was the in-person congress designed to accompany the 2021 conference which was online only. It’s no exaggeration to say that this was the first opportunity for many members of the open education community to meet in person for a couple of years owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, and this imbued the event with a certain festivity. It was also an important opportunity for the ENCORE+ project to connect with many European stakeholders in person. We ran a short workshop and also presented on the forthcoming OER Innovation survey and Framework.
The forthcoming OER Innovation survey was also the focus for a presentation to the Computers and Learning Research Group at The Open University, UK in June 2022. At this session the background research and prototype survey for innovation with and through OER was presented for feedback.
As we move into the integration phase of ENCORE+ (where we start to bring discrete communities of practice together for activities and knowledge sharing/creation) it’s great to once again be able to draw on face-to-face interactions and networking to spread the messages arising from ENCORE+.
Next steps in the Innovation work package? Look out for the launch of our OER Innovation Survey in September 2022. Later in the year we will also be publishing our OER Innovation Evaluation Framework alongside the survey results!
