Author: Roman Gabor

OpenMed project will celebrate Open Education Week with scheduled online events in English and French

Articles by: Roman Gabor

Open Education Week is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its purpose is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.

OpenMed project will celebrate Open Education Week with the following scheduled events including webinars, guest speakers, and online conversations:

  • Monday, March 7th
    Webinar: Open licensing and challenges to adopt OER across the Mediterranean countries
    Time:     3:00-4:00 pm GMT
    Daniel Burgos, Vice-chancellor for Research & Technology, UNIR – Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Spain
    The webinar will run in Adobe Connect, and can be accessed using the following link: http://unir.adobeconnect.com/unirresearch2
  • Tuesday, March 8th
    Panel: Opportunities for the promotion of OER in the Arab World
    Time:     2:00-3:00 pm GMT
    Sana Harbi, UNESCO OER Chair at Université de Sousse, Tunisia and Gemma Tombs, Coventry University, UK
    The panel will run in Blab, and can be accessed using the following link:
    https://blab.im/gemma-tombs-opportunities-for-the-promotion-of-oer-in-the-arab-world
  • Wednesday, March 9th
    Webinar: A low cost Open Education initiative to face massification of higher education in francophone African countries
    Time: 2:00-3:00 pm GMT
    Khalid Berrada, Advisor to the President in charge of pedagogical innovation, responsible of Uc@Mooc project, Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco
    Online: coming soon
  • Thursday, March 10th
    Webinar: Discover Palestine MOOC
    Time: 2:00-3:00 pm GMT
    Saida Affouneh, Director of elearning centre, ANNU, An-Najah National University, Palestine
    The webinar will run in Google Hangouts, and will be streamed at the following link:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geHE4AHIDh8

Full details as well as links to the webinars can be found at http://openmedproject.eu/2016/02/10/oew-16/

The program in pdf format can be downloaded from here.

Meet us at the Open Education Week

Articles by: Roman Gabor

During the days of 7-11 March 2016 EDEN and its members will be actively contributing the content of the Open Education Week, with the aim to raise awareness about free and open educational opportunities that exist for everyone, everywhere, right now. The event is coordinated by EDEN’s strategic partner, the Open Education Consortium, an association of hundreds of institutions and organisations around the world that are committed to the ideals of open education. Universities, colleges, schools and organisations from all over the world have come together to showcase what they are doing to make education more open, free, and available to everyone. Just to give a small sample from the rich programme we would like to highlight, and recommend you to participate, the following events:

  • The OpenMed project will celebrate Open Education Week with 4 scheduled online events in English and French.
  • At 12:00 CET on Monday the 7th, EDEN member and OpenPROF project coordinator, Lithuanian Distance and eLearning (LieDM) Association, will deliver a webinar titled “Open professional collaboration for innovation”. This webinar will introduce how to develop training material on the use of ICT tools for OER development; how to train staff to openly collaborate in the development of online innovative curriculum designing for work based learning; and how to collaborate on adaptation and use of open educational resources for work based learning.
  • Starting at 10:00 CET on Tuesday the 8th, Vytautas Magnus University will present the results of their OUVM (Opening universities through virtual mobility) project via an online webinar, focusing on virtual mobility organisation and management.
  • On Wednesday the 9th, Opening Educational Practices Scotland will organise its 4th OEPS Forum in Stirling. The themes for this forum are using OER (what does good practice look like?); Changing culture, changing practice; and Open education and digital engagement through a widening participation lens. EDEN will deliver a poster during the event, showcasing some of its most relevant OEP related projects and practices.
  • EDEN’s monthly #EDENChat will coincide with the OEW in March, on the evening (at 9PM CET) of Wednesday the 9th of March there will be an ‘Open Education Consortium Special’ event exploring the question of how open we can be.
  • EDEN member institution, the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), will organise a 1-hour webinar on Thursday the 10th at 2PM CET with the title “Task-centred approach to MOOC design: challenges and opportunities” This one hour webinar is part of the EMMA webinars that address different topics about MOOCs, including design, production of videos, use of social media, etc., intended for people willing to improve the pedagogical design of MOOCs.
  • Politehnica University of Timisoara, another valued EDEN member, will organise their event, starting at 10:00 CET on Friday the 11th, with the title “Open Education – concepts, tools, resources, practices”. A regional event with live video-streaming.

European Commission ET2020 Working Groups mandates announced

Articles by: Roman Gabor

EDEN is proud to announce that its nominee Ms. Deborah Arnold has become mandated into the WG on Digital skills and competences (WGDSC), while two other prominent EDEN representatives Dr. Andras Szucs, Secretary General of the Network and Ms. Sandra Kucina Softic, Excecutive Commitee member of EDEN has become WG mandate on behalf of the European Civil Society Platform on Lifelong Learning and the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport of the Republic of Croatia respectively.

ET 2020 Working Groups are informal Commission expert groups at the service of the ET 2020 framework. The primary focus of the Working Groups is to benefit the Member States in their work of furthering policy development through mutual learning and the identification of good practices.

The recent call establishing the WGs for the period 2016 – 2018 concerned the following six Groups:

  • Working Group on Promoting citizenship and the common values of freedom, tolerance and nondiscrimination through education (WGC)
  • Working Group on Digital Skills and Competences (WGDSC)
  • Working Group on Adult Learning (WGAL)
  • Working Group on Vocational Education and Training (WGVET)
  • Working Group on the Modernisation of Higher Education (WGHE)
  • Working Group Schools (WGS)

For more information on the WGs please visits the European Commissions website

Survey on using mobile apps in teachers’ professional development

Articles by: Roman Gabor

Do your pupils enjoy ‘playing’ on the computer, on their tablet or mobile phone? Would you like to stimulate their ICT supported self-regulated learning by implementing successful classroom practices?

The t-MAIL project team is developing a mobile application for primary school teachers to support them in this process. Fill in our questionnaire to help us tailor the app to your needs.

Given the driving objective of the “Teacher Mobile Application for Innovative Learning (t-MAIL)” project, it is vital to understand the needs, concerns, and expectations of primary school teachers regarding the use of a mobile application to support their learning and teaching. Therefore, the partnership launched a survey calling on the input of primary school teachers across Europe. The questionnaire takes about 10 minutes to fill in and will remain open and accessible until March 11th.

We greatly appreciate your input, and hope you share our survey invitation with your wider network of active primary school teaching colleagues. This enhanced understanding and feedback will be key to making an app that works for you!

New Member of the EDEN Executive Committee

Articles by: Roman Gabor

We are happy to announce that Mark Brown, PhD, has been co-opted to serve as the new member of the Executive Committee of EDEN from February 2016.

Professor Brown is Director of the National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL) based at Dublin City University (DCU). Before taking up this position and Ireland’s first Chair in Digital Learning in February of 2014, he was previously Director of the National Centre for Teaching and Learning at Massey University in New Zealand. At Massey he was also Director of the Distance Education and Learning Futures Alliance (DELFA).

Over the last decade he has played key leadership roles in the implementation of several major university-wide digital learning and teaching initiatives, including the enterprise wide deployment of Moodle, the original design and development of the Mahara e-portfolio system, and the university-wide implementation of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform [Open2Study].

Professor Brown’s main research interests are in Higher Education and in particular the areas of policy development, the societal benefits of university-level education, teaching and learning development, online, blended and digital learning, student success and engagement, and the nature of the student learning experience. He serves on several international journal editorial boards and has published extensively in the areas of online, blended and digital learning. In total, he has produced overly 300 scholarly publications and presentations.

He was President of the New Zealand Association for Open, Flexible and Distance Learning (DEANZ) prior to his arrival at DCU, and was until recently Treasurer and an executive committee member of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite). Ascilite is the peak professional body for digital learning in Australia and New Zealand. He is a recipient of a National Award for Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching and remains a member of the New Zealand Academy of Tertiary Teaching Excellence. He currently chairs the Innovation in Teaching and Learning Steering Committee for the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU).