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| Open Educational Quality Initiative website |
Beginning in January 2010, the two-year OPAL Initiative is a partnership between seven organizations including ICDE, UNESCO and ICDE member institution, the Open University UK, and will be coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The project is part funded by the European Commission Education and Training Lifelong Learning Programme.
The OPAL Initiative will move beyond the issue of access to open educational resources (OER), and focus on innovation and quality through open educational practices (OEP). Existing approaches for fostering the use of OER have made achievements by focusing on building access to resources (MERLOT, MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford iTunes, OpenLearn, Rice University, the UNESCO Open Training Platform, the UNESCO OER wiki) and licence models (Creative Commons). However, concerns over quality, the absence of trust on the part of learners and educators, and a lacking sense of ownership of the materials hinder wider acceptance of OER. OPAL will seek to build trust by establishing an environment for quality and Innovation through OEP.
OPAL will work to build a multi-stakeholder environment in order to root quality and innovation in a broad consensus, combine activities and provide an interface for international initiatives which will promote OEP on a sustainable level. The project will address both higher education and adult education, bring stakeholders from each sectors' governance community together, and promote OEP in both sectors so that learners may benefit from continuity when moving between university and adult education.
ICDE will be heavily involved in two particular areas of the project; the establishment and awarding of the OEP Innovation Award to recognize outstanding achievements in the field of OEP, and dissemination and exploitation of the results of the project through targeted conferences, papers and presentations, and workshops and seminars.
The nature of the funding of the project means that the focus will be on the European context, though the involvement of ICDE and UNESCO underlines the project’s strategy of connecting European organizations to international debate, and making the EU a lighthouse region for OEP. In this regard, ICDE commits to disseminate updates from, and findings of the project to its membership with a view to providing other regions of the world with input to their work on promoting innovative open educational practices.
ICDE believes that the OPAL Initiative provides a golden opportunity to follow up recommendations made by the ICDE Task Force on Open Educational Resources. At the same time, the project is very much in line with ICDE’s stated objective to promote quality in distance, flexible and ICT-based education.