Mission
The project aims to build a sustainable and generative environment to support, validate and mainstream emerging open educational practices (OEP). Its activities will be based on and validated by the needs of stakeholders forming the eco-system of open educational practices. OPAL will involve stakeholders through contribution to and validation of practices in which open educational resources are used to improve the quality of educational experiences and stimulate innovation in educational organisations. By aggregating examples of good practice to create comprehensive guidelines, it will bring international initiatives, groups and experts together to form a community for validation and sharing, and promote excellence through openness.
Orientation towards the needs of the OEP community, inclusive validation processes and a broad vision of quality and innovation based on dialogue and inclusion of those involved in educational practice will enable the project to build a strong, trusted brand. In this way the project will support existing scenarios and inform and define future scenarios for innovative open educational practices in higher education and adult education.
Vision
By 2012, the OPAL Initiative will have established the foundations for the emerging concept of open educational practices (OEP). It will have built an easy-to-use, dynamic and viable quality framework for OEP which will be validated by a self-sustaining, self-organized community. A community is envisioned which will serve as a dynamic living lab in which carefully crafted and meaningful stories in the form of case studies are shared, analyzed and aggregated to be fed back as tools for improvement and innovation, to be learned from, and to support the development of quality. The OPAL Initiative will serve as a community hub providing methodologies for turning guidance for good practice and case studies of open educational practices into key messages and continually improving recommendations.
This can even include laying out the foundations for the creation of degrees and accreditation systems based on OER.