Today and tomorrow we will be at OER15 exhibiting our poster on the Open Education Handbook in the poster display. You can see the poster on Slideshare or download as a PDF.

Abstract

Where would you go if you wanted to know about the history of open education? What about if you were after a list of editor tools for remixing OERs? Or if you wanted to know more about open learning and practice? How about if you wanted to find out more about OERs and their use in the developing world? Or were considering what affect open education has on education? And what about if you were interested in open education data?

There is a lot of information on open education and OERs strewn across the web but now it has been brought together in a collaboratively written, user-friendly handbook.

The Open Education Handbook is a living web document targeting educational practitioners and the education community at large. It is the result of a crowd-sourced initiative led by the Open Education Working Group: one in the series of over 20 Open Knowledge working groups that has been established to bring together people and groups interested in open education. The handbook has been drafted over a series of online and offline events including booksprints and focused mailing list discussions. Content is key within the handbook and it has a broad coverage considering both practical and factual areas and more discursive topics.

The handbook is currently held in Booktype, an open source platform for writing and publishing print and digital books. Content from the handbook has been translated into Portuguese (Manual de Educação Aberta) surfaced in open education books, featured on Slidewiki and reused in lots of other great places. Late last year the handbook was edited and tidied up. Improvements were made to many areas including overall structure, typos and writing, universal style, fact checking, citations and links, glossary and definitions. An iteration of the handbook was then made available as a PDF and in ePub format.

To realise its full potential as a resource the handbook needs to be allowed to continue to evolve and be built upon. Discussions have already taken place around the future of the handbook and possible ideas include moving it to Wiki books, embedding it within Wikipedia and building a front-end for it to use with Booktype. It is hoped that these ideas can be developed further in discussion with the community.

Would you be interested in contributing to the handbook? Can you help formulate the next steps for this great open resource? This poster will share highlights from the handbook, its development and its future.

The Handbook is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

References

• The Open Education Handbook: http://education.okfn.org/handbook/
• The Open Education Working Group: http://education.okfn.org/
• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Marieke Guy at OER15 with the Open Education Handbook poster