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Creating European standards for open education and..
Creating European standards for open education and open learning resources
Start date: Sep 1, 2014,
End date: Aug 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
The main aim of the project EU-StORe - European Standards for Open Education and Open Learning Resources is to conceptualise and implement a European inventory of open learning resources, to analyse open learning scenarios and open learning resources, and to create shared common European standards and guidelines for open learning.
Open education and open learning resources are actually one of the main educational topics in the EU. In the vision paper on open education 2030 J. M. Pawlowski stated that education is distributed on a global market. Therefore, he argued it is crucial for Europe to engage a broad
community in cross-border collaboration to be successful in this field. In the vision paper ´Open Education 2030´ he comes up with six recommendations: (see Pawlowski, p. 78)
1. to create an inventory of OER and OEP
2. to integrate existing communities
3. to integrate curricula
4. to create regional networks
5. to create global outreach programs
6. to support open education policy building !
One aim is, that like in a huge store, online learning resources and open learning should be provided all over Europe for free. Although it is a big chance to make education available for a broad European group of interested learners, teachers, and trainers, there is no quality assurance
of the courses, learning resources, and open measures. Pedagogical material and education will be risky, if there are no standards to make sure that the content is correct and didactically well-prepared concerning the aims of the project, the didactical methods, the structure, the level of difficulty, the provided information and tasks as well as concerning the needs of the target groups. In former educational concepts experts were
responsible to design the curriculum, courses and the learning materials. Nowadays, with unstructured and widely varying creation of content we have to create standards and guidelines to ensure these quality aspects and foster quality to fight social disadvantages, which can occur via wrong, unstructured or misleading information and knowledge. Especially disadvantaged and marginalised groups in European society can suffer from misleading information due to the fact that they face lots of challenges. For example it might be possible that they have fewer chances to identify problems and quality deficits of provided open educational resources themselves.
This is the point where EU-StORe comes into action. It is based on the recommendations of Pawlowski and the EU and builds an inventory of online learning resources. Moreover, experts analyse these materials and courses and create standards for open learning activities, which provide a high quality. This leads to guidelines and standards that can be used (a) to create open learning scenarios in the future and (b) to rate existing open learning activities and resources. To integrate this information in the European learning community the standards are provided on an online platform where the inventory is also accessible. This is a basis to foster curricular design and the work of regional networks. The guidelines and standards have to be combined with policy papers, which engage ministries, the European Commission and multipliers in the field of education in different European countries in the process of implementing the standards.
In order to conceptualize the inventory, to analyse it and to create standards EU-StORe uses partners who are experts in:
• Didactics and open learning / training courses
• Developing e-learning concepts
• Developing online technology and platform design, ICT design
• Dissemination activities and exploitation
• Standards and norm creating
• Evaluating education programmes
• Policy counselling
In former times educational concepts experts were responsible to design the curriculum, courses and the learning materials. Nowadays, with unstructured and widely varying creation of content we have to create standards and guidelines to ensure these quality aspects and foster quality to fight social disadvantages, which can occur via wrong, unstructured or misleading information and knowledge.
This was the point where EU-StORe comes into action. It was based on the recommendations of Pawlowski and the EU and builds an inventory of online learning resources. Moreover, experts have been analysed these materials and courses and created standards for open learning activities, which provide a high quality. This leaded to guidelines and standards that can be used (a) to create open learning scenarios in the future and (b) to rate existing open learning activities and resources. In order to integrate this information in the European learning community the standards were provided on an online platform where the inventory is also accessible. This is a basis to foster curricular design and the work of regional networks. The guidelines and standards have been combined with policy papers, which engage ministries, the European Commission and mu