Open Education Strategies

The aim of this course is to empower students for the development of OE deployment strategies and implementation plans that should fit to a particular context. This includes strategies at the international level, national OE strategies as well as organisation level strategies.

Students will be able to:

• develop or improve OE strategies for specific educational environments at international, national and organizational level;

• validate and critically assess OE strategies, OE implementation plans and corresponding outcomes;

• distinguish between good and bad OE strategies;

• relate strategies with the internal system requirements and external trends and factors affecting OE operation.

Students should have the basic understanding of the global or specific educational environments and the concept and approaches to opennes, obtained in the Introduction to Open Education course. They should be able to use communication and collaboration tools, and should be prepared to work in interdisciplinary teams.

• During the course students will be learning
• about strategies to implement OE in a par-ticular environment – international, nation-al, organisational.
• Students will learn in more detail about the trends in education, policies, how they af-fect the current roles and processes in edu-cation in order to better understand suc-cessful OE strategies, implementation steps, opportunities and barriers to be taken into account when developing and imple-menting OE in a particular context.
• Students will study successful strategies hat usually differ from case to case, so the im-portant learning outcome will be student’s ability to create successful strategies, de-vise deployment steps, follow, assess and manage the OE deployment appropriate for a particular context.

The following topics will be explored in more detail:

1) Trends in education and organizations
2) Potential value added models
3) Open access policies
4) Changing roles, rules and organization
5) Motivation and added value models for stakeholders
6) Most common strategies
7) Path to implementation, organizational change, cultural change
8) Student centred learning

After completing this course, students will:

• Have deep insigt in the OE added value models, current trends in OE, necessary society and organisational changes, different cultural and legal environments, corresponding policies and in particular best practices;

• Master the preparation of effective OE deployment and development strategies;

• Master the development of the implementation plans for OE deployment;

• Be able to monitor, manage, evaluate, validate and critically assess the proposed activities and ongoing OE deployment process;

• Be able to reflect on personal performance in terms of innovating new OE models and their applications;

• Understand the main drivers and obstacles and their influences in OE strategy deployment;

• Be able to devise supporting activities needed for effective OE strategy implementation.

• Orr, D., Weller, M., and Farrow. R. (2018). Models for online, open, flexible and technology enhanced higher education across the globe – a comparative analysis, chapters 6-9. International Council for Distance Education. Available at E-version
• Kane, G. C., Palmer, D., Philips Nguyen, A., Kiron, D., & Buckley, N. (2015). Strategy, Not Technology, Drives Digital Transformation. MIT Sloan Management Review, (57181), 27. Available at E-version
• Orr, D. (2018) Aligning Open Education with Strategic Goals. Talk delivered as part of Open Education Design course, OE For a Better World (OE4BW), Univerza v Novi Gorci, Slovenia. Available at E-version
• Amiel, T., ter Haar, E., Vieira, M. S., & Soares, T. C. (in press). Who benefits from the public good? How OER is contributing to the private appropriation of the educational commons. In P. N. Mizukami & J. F. Reia (Eds.), Shadow libraries – From the photocopier to the cloud: Access to knowledge, piracy and education. Rio de Janeiro: CTS/FGV. E-version E-version

• (40%) Interim presentations • (60%). Exam, combining the theoretical part and a presentation of the practical work on defining OE strategy developed during the course.

Dr. Dominic Orr is adjunct professor for educational management at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia and part of the team leadership at GIZ for the BMZ-funded digital learning platform called atingi, which has over 400 thousand registered users. He follows and shapes educational reform through his work. In 2020 a publication he co-authored on the future of higher education in 2030 was published by Springer. He has worked as an external consultant for the EU, the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank.

Selected bibliography:

Janssen, B., & Orr, D. (2020). Falling Walls Future Learning Report 2020. Falling Walls. Unpublished internal report.

Orr, D. (2020). Bologna Process in the Global Higher Education Arena. Going Digital? European Higher Education Area: Challenges for a New Decade, 503–515. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56316-5_31

Orr, D. (2020). Mind the gap - preparing for the future of higher education now (ACA Think Pieces). ACA. https://aca-secretariat.be/post_other_pub/aca-think-pieces-the-world-after-covid-19-4/?yearPub=2020

Orr, D., Luebcke, M., Schmidt, J. P., Ebner, M., Wannemacher, K., Ebner, M., & Dohmen, D. (2020). Higher Education Landscape 2030: A Trend Analysis Based on the AHEAD International Horizon Scanning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44897-4

Orr, D., Pupinis, M., & Kirdulytė, G. (2020). Towards a European approach to micro-credentials: a study of practices and commonalities in offering micro-credentials in European higher education. European Union. https://doi.org/10.2766/7338

Miao, F., Mishra, S., Orr, D., & Janssen, B. (2019). Guidelines on the development of open educational resources policies. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000371129

Buchem, I., Orr, D., & Brunn, C. (2019). Making competences visible with Open Badges. Hochschulforum Digitalisierung. https://hochschulforumdigitalisierung.de/sites/default/files/dateien/HFD_AP_Nr48_Open_Badges_Bericht_2019_EN_web.pdf