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The OPAL Awards were coordinated by ICDE as part of the The Open Educational Quality Initiative, a consortium including UNESCO, ICDE, EFQUEL and several European universities working to promote open educational practices in higher and adult education. The OPAL Awards recognize excellence in OER policy, promotion and use, which have resulted in the improvement of quality and innovation in educational organizations. A grant was made available for each of the winning entries to make a video film describing their practices.
The winners and highly commended entries are as follows:
The Award for Bodies which Influence Policy
Winner: The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), USA
Since 2009, ISKME has trained over 1,500 teachers from 25 countries with focus on collaborative innovation and social learning using open curriculum and open teacher-led approaches. Their OER-focused programs are designed to empower teachers to take an active leadership role in educational resource reform, encourage collaboration, drive innovation and explore emerging economic models for sustaining high-quality learning content that is accessible by anyone. ISKME’s approach allows teachers to gain leadership and support to adapt and develop resources for their own needs, and then to share those resources with others.
The Award for Institutions
Winner: University of California, Irvine, USA
UCI Distance Learning Center (DLC) was officially started in August 2001 to develop and deliver online courses and programs for the University. Today, the DLC offers over 160 online courses per quarter. UCI began its OpenCourseWare initiative in November 2006 in order to be a part of the growing open educational resource and OCW movements on a global scale and to provide UC-quality courses and instructional materials to deserving students and teachers around the world, for free.
Highly commended: Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, India
ANDC, established in 1991 is a constituent college of the University of Delhi specialising in basic and applied sciences. The college caters to students who are mostly from lower economic backgrounds, many of whom come from conservative societies and educational modes. ANDC is one of the very few colleges in the traditional University system in India that has committed to OER.
The Award for Learning contexts
The Open Science Resources project suggests a coordinated solution at European level to harvest the potential of digital science education repositories and overcome the barriers such as: the lack of interoperability between repositories, the inefficiency of current content organization and metadata structures as well as multi-lingual issues. To implement the OSR vision, the project partners have brought together a balanced mix of high quality science museums and science centres, pedagogues, educational technologists, metadata experts, user groups and standardization bodies.
Highly commended: The LORO Project, Department of Languages, The Open University UK
LORO (Languages Open Resources Online) was launched in 2009, funded by JISC and the Open University to create a repository where the online teaching materials used by teachers at the Department of Languages could be stored and shared openly. Its function was closely linked to the efficient delivery of resources to all stakeholders but also to skills and professional development for language teachers. LORO was conceived as a tool for teachers and language teaching professionals, benefitting language learners indirectly through the enhancement in the quality and variety of resources used by language teachers at the institution.
Full details on the awards ceremony and the winners and highly commended entries, as well as interviews with the recipients can be found on the OPAL website.
7 December 2011
