News Archives

Success with the UNESCO Recommendation to promote access to educational resources for all

The OpeningupSlovenia think tank has after a five year long commitment succeeded in its work with UNESCO to publish this new Recommendation that will support the development and sharing of openly licensed learning and teaching materials, benefitting students, teachers and researchers worldwide. This global document comes also with the memory to our friends who started this journey with us but are not here to celebrate, Indrajit Banerjee, and Fred Mulder.

2nd World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress

Success with International Open Education Design Workshop in Vipava

The University of Nova Gorica (UNG) and UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for OER and Open Learning at the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI) have just finished running the Open Education Design Workshop, in Lanthieri mansion in Vipava, Slovenia. During the 4-day workshop, the participants have acquired the basic knowledge about open education concepts, pedagogical and didactic issues as well as content related issues in open education. It was fun!

 

Final steps towards global OER Recommendation

The OpeningupSlovenia think tank partners have been working on the UNESCO OER Recommendation for the past four years, and on May 28th the last version of the policy was accepted by UNESCO member states. Its final step for approval will take place at the UNESCO General Assembly in November, 2019. The final text of the document will be now coordinated and translated by UNESCO and they will publish it prior to the November meeting.

Artificial Intelligence and frontier technologies for OER

OpeningupSlovenia was presenting an upcoming report on the use of AI and OER, together with UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector. This years UNESCO Mobile Learning Week 2019 (4-8 March) focused on Artificial Intelligence and sustainable development.

Building certificates and credentails in the blockchain

Together with our partners, Knowledge 4 All Foundation (K4A) and the Jozef Stefan Institute (JSI), 0xcert is building a blockchain-based system for issuing and management of academic credentials, leveraging blockchain qualities of traceability, security, and ease of authentication.

Also, by implementing the NFT (non-fungible token) technology, the uniqueness, metadata, and identity related to a certificate or micro-credential can be securely protected on a ledger while providing all involved parties with a simple, autonomous, and intuitive means of management.

All this is being developed within the MicroHE project which aims to provide the most comprehensive policy analysis yet conducted of the impact of modularisation, unbundling and micro-credentialing in European Higher Education.

#microcredentials, #crypto,#exchanges, #plagiarism, #fake degrees, and #authenticity issues

0xcert protocol

 

AI World Summit, educational services and AI alliances

We attended the AI World Summit in Amsterdam, and two presentations stood out to validate our approach in personalisation in education and the approach of our own alliance in Slovenia.

The presentation matching our AI work in Slovenia was by Squirrel AI, headquartered in Shanghai, Yixue Squirrel AI is the first K12 EdTech company which specializes in intelligent adaptive education in China and is the market leader. Squirrel AI is a machine that regularly outperforms human teachers and redefines education, says founder Derek Haoyang Li.

Another presentaton we watched with great delight was the launch of  the  ALLAI Nederland, the first national alliance on artificial intelligence in Europe, a similar initiave to OpeningupSlovenia.

Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence: Reflection on its complexity and impact on our society

We were invited to the Roundtable on “Artificial Intelligence: Reflection on its complexity and impact on our society”, commemorating 25  years of reflection on bioethics and ethics of science and technology at UNESCO.  The roundtable will be moderated by Prof. Peter-Paul Verbeek, Faculty of Philosophy of Twente University, Netherlands and a member of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology of the UNESCO (COMEST).

 

OER practitioners from all the world gather in Slovenia

The University of Nova Gorica and UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for OER organized a 5-day course on Open Education Design in Lanthieri Mansion in Vipava.

Lecturers and participants came from 17 countries (Slovenia, Brazil, Fiji, France, Greece, India, Italy, South Africa, Canada, Kenya, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Germany, Uzbekistan, United Kingdom, USA) .

The  course equiped the participants with basic knowledge, practical advice and hands-on experience to prepare them for their own design of OER.

Videos are coming soon!

 

Strong Slovenian presence @ OE Global conference 2018

Slovenia hosted the 2014 edition of the OE Global conference. This years edition was the most internationally diverse one, devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students from more than 35 countries to discuss and explore how Open Education advances educational practices around the world. OuS members attendedd with a set of presentations on technology, policy and content solutions, shown by X5GON project, VideoLectures.Net portal and UNESCO Recommendation in OER.

Copyright issues in education across the world @ CC’s annual Global Summit

Our members have presented a session on “Fixing Copyright to Meet the Needs of Educators – Global State of Play” at the Creative Commons Summit in Toronto, Canada. The session essentially described the legislative process in multiple countries concerned copyright and education in 2017. More importantly, how this became an important advocacy issue, with activists networking to raise visibility of the issue, and in order to better support each other. The session reflected on those developments, and build momentum for 2018 and later.