It’s almost time for the Christmas holidays, so to mark the occasion we thought we would share our 12 Open Education Days of Christmas. The list is partly inspired by the Open Education Handbook and partly by the great conversations we have been having with projects, initiatives and people since the group launched in September. Please do feel free to comment and add your own ideas!!

Wishing you all the best for Christmas and the New Year from the Open Education Working Group!

1 Pinterest Board

Open Education – board with lots of info graphics, videos and logos.

2 Booksprints

In London and Berlin for the Open Education Handbook. Thanks to all who contributed!

3 LinkedIn Groups

1. Open Education (free to share and remix)
2. Open Data Cloud: education, skills, funding and open data
3. Nordic Open Education – Nordic OER

4 Examples of Open Learning and Practice

1. The Open University Innovating Pedagogy 2013 report has some great examples including gaming, crowd learning and maker culture.
2. Ideas around the Flipped classroom involve inverting traditional teaching, using online resources for lessons and F2F for homework.
3. The Open Educational quality Initiative (OPAL) has created an Open Educational Practice Roadmap, bring together a number of tools, to guide specific groups in their implementation of OEP.
4. David Wiley recently wrote a blog post on What is Open Pedagogy? In it he outlines an example assignment that leverages the reuse, revise, remix, redistribute permissions of open educational resources.

5 PearlTrees

Pearltrees is a visual and collaborative curation tool that allows users to collect, organize and share any URL they find online. It’s a great way to find new resources.

1. Team Open Education
2. Open Education Resources
3. Open Source Resources
4. OER Lesson planning
5. Open data

6 Open Education around the World blog posts

Remember if you’d like to write about open education in your country please get in touch using education [at] okfn.org.

1. Open Education England by David Kernohan
2. Open Education Iceland by Tryggvi Thayer
3. Open Education Scotland by Lorna Campbell
4. Open Education Tanzania by Ben Taylor
5. Open Education Rwanda by Bernard Nkuyubwatsi
6. Open Education India by Subhajit Ganguly

8 Open Licences

As defined by the open definition.

Listed on the Creative Commons site there are Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Attribution-Share Alike (BY SA) and CC Zero.

There is also Open Publication License, Against DRM license, GNU Free Documentation License, Open Game License and Free Art License.

9 Facebook Groups and Pages

1. Open Education Database – A collection of online college rankings and free courses.
2. Open Knowledge Foundation – A global movement to open up knowledge around the world and see it used and useful.
3. LinkedUp Project – Project encouraging use of open data for educational purposes.
4. Hive Learning Network – Knowledge lab dedicated to helping youth find and explore their interests. Make! Hack! Learn!
5. Nordic Open Education Alliance – Network for educators, learners, teachers and decision makers.
6. Open Educational Resources (OER) – Participatory network for all OER stakeholders worldwide.
7. Peer 2 Peer University – Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything.
8. Mozilla Open Badges Get recognition for skills and achievements that happen online or out of school.

10 Open Education Conferences

1. OpenEd conference – Annual conference held in US, currently the biggest Open education conference in the world.
2. Helsinki Learning Festival – To be held for the first time in 2014: Innovation, play and global sharing.
3. Online Educa – Annual global elearning conference held in Berlin.
4. Inaugral International Conference on Open and Flexible Learning (ICOFE) – Annual event held last year in Hong Kong.
5. OER14 conference – fairly new conference held in the UK, focused on OER.
6. OCWC Conference – Held in the US and organised by the Open Courseware Consortium.
7. International Conference of the African Virtual University – This year was the first year this conference ran, held in Kenya.
8. Mozilla Festival – Annual event usually held in London, lots of teaching and learning activities related to web.
9. Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning – Annual event organised by the Commonwealth of Learning, held in Africa.
10. OKFest – The Open Knowledge Foundation Festival – this year open education is likely to an important area.

11 OER Use Cases

1. Open Education Europa – The European Commission’s single gateway to European OER launched this year as part of the Opening Up Education initiative.
2. OER Africa – Initiative established by the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide) supporting higher education institutions across Africa in the development and use of OERs.
3. The University of Oxford – The University of Oxford has several OER sites including this podcast one.
4. The Open University – Openlearn is the Open University’s free course and MOOC catalogue.
5. The African Virtual University – Pan African Intergovernmental Organisation with many open courses.
6. OERu – the wiki for OERu (OER University) on WikiEducator.
7. MIT OpenCourseWare – The first OER course provider.
8. Open Content blog – Various initiatives in Utah, written by David Wiley.
9. School of Open – a collaboration between P2PU and Creative Commons and a way to learn about open practices.
10. CORE – China Open Resources for Education (CORE).

12 Twitter accounts to follow

1. Open Education Working Group – that’s us!
2. OER Research hub
3. OER Commons
4. Writing Commons
5. Open Education EU
6. Jorum Team
7. OERs 4 OpenSchools
8. Open Education Group
9. Open Society
10. Open Education Week
11. OECD_Edu
12. BBC Education