Towards a Nordic Alliance for Open Educational Resources

Yesterday the 25th of November 2012 I wrote a blog post on Disruptive Innovation. I claimed  that Open Educational Resources, OER unfortunately are not very high ranked and on the agenda in the Nordic countries, whereas OER are discussed widely on a global, European and sometimes even  on  a Nordic level. For example the OER Paris declaration is almost unknown, sorry to say. This is very strange in countries where education always have been part of democratic processes and  where education in different settings always have been valued very high, for example so called "folkbildning".  Many countries around the world have even had the Nordic countries educational system ranked very high and as good examples. For example Finland are ranked year after year as number one in PISA studies. At the same time in all the Nordic countries Internet is available and accessible everywhere for everyone.

The OER Paris declaration shows the importance of Open Educational Resources and gives recommendations to governments and institutions around the globe. The European Union has just launched a large-scale initiative on “Opening Up Education” and the Cyprus EU Presidency in cooperation with the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research organises a Ministerial Conference on “Opening up education through technologies” in Oslo in beginning of December 2012. The Nordic countries need to consolidate and to act!  

Towards a Nordic Alliance for Open Educational Resources

These developments have been the starting point for a Nordic initiative on promoting and utilizing Open Education in the Nordic countries with a focus on creating a strong base for OER and Open Educational Practices (OEP) amongst the Nordic countries and in the Nordic region, but also with a global outreach in mind. The Nordic countries have the potential to become a forerunner in OEP and the use of OER activities in Europe:

The Nordic countries share many values related to education and technology development and use; the political and governmental institutions are quite similar; and there is a tradition for cooperation, exchange of knowledge and solutions between the countries. To focus on a relatively homogeneous region which shares many basic values allows us to build knowledge and come up with specific recommendations that can be useful for policy makers at different levels, be implemented in policies and practice, and used to form new co-operations (from the Nordic Alliance for OER policy paper, November 2012)

Contacts persons in this initial phase are Jan M. Pawlowski (jan.pawlowski@jyu.fi) and Tore Hoel (tore.hoel@hioa.no). 

Questions and comments can also be sent to Ebba Ossiannilson (ebba.ossiannilsson@ced.lu.se)

Disruptive innovations

2012 is the year of the Tsunami in higher education, the flipped system or disruptive innovations. With disruptive innovation is understood an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network, displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market. This was exacty what happend with the music industry and when we got Spotify. 

 Photo by: Shalom Jacobovitz. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 
The open educational paradigm is strong around the globe and implemented on a broad front, in many continents. There are so many open initiatives aleady availabel out there. The  MOOCs (Massive Open Olnline Cources) by for example  Coursera (Stanford som drivkraft), edX (MIT, Harvard, Berkeley), Udacity och World Education University (WEU), P2P University, University of the People and the OERu just to mention some initiatives. During the recent years it has accumualted and the open edcuational map look almost new every single day. Open, accessible, personalised learning and education gives possibilities for global learning for all at home. Globally UNESCO, Commonwealth of  Learning, OECD and the European Commission force issues on the Rethinking education strategy. 

Flipped Classroom have aslo become a concept really challenging traditional educational settings. There are movements such as flipping the entire educational system, and to turn everything upside down, thus not just to flip the classroom, but everything around educational settings and traditions.  The ideas behind the flipped classroom it is that  it requires educators to reconstruct traditional classrooms to a large extent.  Students work at their own pace, receiving lectures at home via online video or podcasts and then devoting class time to more in-depth discussion and traditional “homework.” This is in alignement with personalised and flexible learning. Yesterday 24th Novemer there was an interesting  post in Ecudemic  by Katie Lepi  on 16 Flipped Classrooms around the World.  

In the Nordic countries, however open education, OER and the Parisdeclaration on OER, MOOCs etc and  the entire tsunami is a so called NO question and not at all on the political agenda at Universities, Governments  and Educational organisations. 

Research shows that countries who have political national visions and strategies and Universities who have strong management and again visions and strategies have have achieved stronger and more sustainablle open education for all, not just for the own national students, but for all students around the globe.

It is urgent to act!

The urgent question for 2013 is how the Nordic Countries, its governements, authorities and Universities will act  and be part of  personalised global open learning and rethinking education.