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The OER Community now has a permanent base at Athabasca University, Canada’s Open University. The university's strong commitment to open education constitutes it as an excellent base for the OER Community's ongoing interaction over the coming years. The OER Communities work at UNESCO was fruitful and UNESCO has several specific OER related activities in its current work plan.
The focus of the OER Community has been and will continue to be awareness raising and capacity building internationally to promote OER, as is deemed appropriate to local circumstances. Over the past years a wide range of topics and issues have been engaged in and discussed. Since OER Community started in 2005, the concept of openly sharing and re-using educational materials has become more widely accepted and interest has grown. There are many more OER initiatives worldwide, and there are numerous conferences and conference sessions related to OER that attest to the increasing interest.
The focus of the next stage of this international information sharing will be a series of discussions related to some of the key conferences. In this way discussions in different corners of the world will have the opportunity to be heard and an idea gained on what have become the current predominant issues related to development and use. This series of discussions will start with one on the outcomes of the meeting of the OpenCourseWare Consortium in Vietnam earlier this year. Mary Lou Forward, the Executive Director, will act as discussant and will be joined by several of her colleagues.
29 September 2010