Next post on Open Education Around the World comes from Serbia. Serbia is a country on southeast Europe’s Balkan peninsula with vast northern plateaus and mountains with ski resorts to the south. It has connected West with East for centuries – a land in which civilisations, cultures, faiths, climates and landscapes meet and mingle. Capital city Belgrade is home to Kalemegdan Park, site of an ancient fortress held successively by the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires. One of the world’s great inventors Nikola Tesla, American scientist of Serbian origin, gave his greatest contribution to science and technological progress of the world.

Ranka Stankovic (BAEKTEL project) and Ivana Madžarević (Wikimedia Serbia) have kindly prepared this post describing the situation of Open Education in Serbia and projects that they are running in this field.

Ranka Stanković (left) Ivana Madžarević (right)

Ranka Stanković is associate professor at University of Belgrade, Faculty of Mining and Geology, where she is teaching several courses related to informatics and geoinformatics. She received her Master’s degree in 2000 and Ph.D. 2009 at the Department for Computer science, Faculty of Mathematics University of Belgrade. Professor Stanković is interested in e-learning, open education, semantic web, information systems, database modeling, geoinformation management and artificial intelligence. Her current research is focused on building custom components that incorporate knowledge from various language  and lexical resources. Ivana Madžarević is a Program and Community Manager at Wikimedia Serbia since January 2014. She’s been involved with coordinating volonteers, leading and organizing programs. From her experience, she can tell that teachers and professors are willing to implement open education resources into classes.

In Serbia, there are several attempts to develop Open Educational Resources (OER) either using well-defined practices in other countries or their own solutions. The videos with translations or synchronization of from Khan Academy are available in Serbian. The Khan Academy in Serbia works on the translation of the Khan platform and interactive exercises. The Belgrade University Library “Svetozar Marković” developed a project “Knowledge for all” of translation of courses and free learning materials into Serbian. The New Media Center kuda.org, an independent organization that brings together artists, activists within the media, researchers, and the general public in the field of information technology, has been operating in Serbia. The newly formed “Balkan Distance Education Network BADEN” was also created with the aim of hosting resources and information related to open, distance and e-learning. More detail can be found in Report on legal and technological conditions pertaining to OER in WB PC

BAEKTEL project

One of the major projects in the Open Education field in Serbia is BAEKTEL project. The main goal of the BAEKTEL (Blending Academic and Entrepreneurial Knowledge in Technology Enhanced Learning) project (http://baektel.eu/) is to enable technology enhanced knowledge transfer between academia and enterprises. The project is following basic OER principles, is funded by EACEA (Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency) of the European Commission for period 2014-2016.

In the envisaged network of institutions OER materials from both sources will be available on the web for everyone, anytime, which will broaden knowledge acquired within higher education institutions, on the one hand, and foster life-long learning within enterprises, on the other. While at the university, future experts will be offered an insight into expert knowledge gained through practice within enterprises. On the other hand, once they graduate and become employees, they will have an opportunity for life-long learning, through access to state of the art high quality academic courses. By blending academic and entrepreneurial knowledge within one technological framework, the BAEKTEL network, the proposed approach additionally contributes to improvement and enhancement of relations between the academia and the enterprises and integration of creative research potential with industry and academic institutions.

The objective of the project is to produce course materials in several different languages, in various forms such as videos, audio streams and written material. In order to facilitate the use of these materials in a multilingual environment, a language support system will be put in place, consisting mainly of electronic terminological resources and services. Given the composition of the project partners the network will be initially populated by materials from the domains of ICT, geoinformatics, mining engineering and environmental protection, but the other domains will be gradually included.

The initial framework is conceived as a network of six WB universities, two companies and tree universities from EU and other partners (http://baektel.eu/?menu=partners). All of them will develop and publish their OER at common BAEKTEL portal http://edx.baektel.eu. The ICT solution also includes BAEKTEL Metadata Portal (BMP, available at http://meta.baektel.eu), as a central repository with metadata for all published OER within BAEKTEL. The metadata model for BAEKTEL learning resources was defined based on Doublin Core with addition of some elements from LOM, in order to describe the resources sufficiently well for the user to be able to locate and assess them easily, and to facilitate exchange with other OER systems. Since OER content within the network can be published in different languages, the web application and web services support the network multilinguality, but also offer various features related to query expansion, information retrieval, OER indexing and classification, and the like.

Follow BAEKTEL project activities on https://www.facebook.com/baektel

Programs of Wikimedia Serbia

Wikimedia Serbia in a non-profit, non-governmental organization whose goals are creating, gathering and multiplication of free content in Serbian language, as well as promoting the idea of equal access to free knowledge for all people.

Activities of Wikimedia Serbia aim to promote Wiki projects (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiquote and others) as free education platform. Among our activities, the most important and the most developed one is our Education program, that has been developing since 2007. This is also the oldest EDU project in worldwide Wiki movement. The idea is using Wiki platforms in education and establishing cooperation with education institutions (high schools, faculties). Students and pupils have аn opportunity to write their seminal papers directly on Wikipedia. It’s free, it’s easy and, most importantly, someone’s effort will not be forgotten. It is instantly visible and useful for others. From 2007 to 2015, EDU project has grown and evolved. Community has established the rules for Wiki Student and Wiki Gymnasium. Over the years, Wikimedia Serbia has cooperated with more then 20 educational institutions such as Faculty of Mathematics, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Faculty of Mining and Geology, Faculty of Geography, School of Electrical Engineering, The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Applied Studies, but also with high schools: Third Belgrade Gymnasium, Fifth Belgrade Gymnasium, Seventh Belgrade Gymnasium, Gymnasium in Ivanjica, Gymnasium in Užice, Gymnasium in Knjaževac, Mathematical Grammar School and others. Similar, global program involves other Wikimedia chapthers. In order to learn about other chapter’s experiences, we have organized EduWiki conference in March 2014. Program was consisted of sessions that were presented by speakers from abroad but also by professors from Serbia who presented successful projects. Students have recognized the importance of this type of education and some of them have become Wiki ambassadors.

Beside Wikipedia, there are other Wiki projects that have the potential to be used in education. One of them is Wikibooks, which was edited by students from Faculty of Mining and Geology. They have created manual for AutoCAD usage.

We cooperated with interested librarians as well. Goals of Wiki Librarian are  informing and training librarians for participation in creating articles on Wikipedia, uploading photo material on Wikimedia Commons but also improving Wiki projects with digitized books. The examples for that are:

• Great National Encyclopedia of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 1
• Great National Encyclopedia of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 2
• Great National Encyclopedia of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 3
• Great National Encyclopedia of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 4

Over the years, these projects have proved to be successful and recognized by educational and cultural institutions as well as by students and high school pupils. We have encountered and overcame numerous challenges over the years. Our focus was on learning from each of them. Still, we are aware that there are many more to come,  but we are willing to face them, in order to improve our endeavors.

You can follow Wikimedia Serbia on Facebook and their blog.

Our next post on Open Education from Around the World comes from Sandra Kučina Softić from Croatia. Croatia is a country of rich historical heritage, natural beauty and a pleasant climate. The beginnings of schools and education in Croatia date back to the 10th century. and the University of Zagreb, founded in 1669, is the oldest continuously operating university in South Eastern Europe. There are more than 120 higher education institutions and 850 schools. In 2014 Croatian Parliament adopted the new Education, Science and Technology Strategy setting the new guidelines towards open, mobile and innovative Croatian society.

Sandra Kučina Softić is the Assistant Director for Education and User Support at the University Computing Centre SRCE. She is also heading the E-Learning Centre at SRCE and the E-learning Office of the University of Zagreb, central support units for the implementation of e-learning in higher education. She is monitoring and enhancing the e-learning implementation process at the higher institutions in Croatia, primarily at the University of Zagreb, and providing support and advice to institutions, teachers and students in implementation of new technologies in and teaching and learning process. For her work on the development and systematic implementation of e-learning at the University of Zagreb she has received the Rector award in 2011. She is a member of the Committee for the E-learning and Internet Services at the University of Zagreb and EDEN executive committee member. In 2014 she has received the EDEN Fellow Award. She has finished the Master of Science in Digital education programme at the University of Edinburgh.

The Croatian Parliament adopted the new Education, Science and Technology Strategy in October 2014. The Strategy stressed that Croatia should be open, mobile and innovative with science and education as developmental priorities. The Strategy mission is to ensure high-quality education available to everyone under the same conditions and possibilities. The Strategy emphasises also the importance of using information and communication technologies in educational process, fostering the implementation of e-learning, other modern methods of teaching based on ICT and development of open educational resources.

St. Mark’s Church, Zagreb

Using technology in education doesn’t imply openness of educational resources, but can be a key factor in speeding it up. The use of technology in education, as a tool for improving the quality of teaching and learning process, is inevitable in today’s education system and, as such, it follows the tendencies of the 21^st century education. Gaining the equal access to centralized LLP programmes in 2009 enabled Croatia to invest more into the development of the digital educational resources. But the idea of free education and open sharing in education is not new in Croatia. There is a number of smaller scale initiatives and achievement by institutions.

Examples of good practice

One of the leading institutions that has, for many years, strongly supported and encouraged the idea and best practices of open access, as well as the usage of open educational resources (OER), is University of Zagreb University Computing Centre (SRCE). SRCE (http://www.srce.unizg.hr/en/) is the main computing centre and the architect of e-infrastructure, covering both the University of Zagreb and the whole research and higher education system. Furthermore, SRCE is the competence centre for information and communication technologies, as well as the centre for education and support in the area of ICT application.

SRCE is centre for education and support in the area of ICT application

SRCE signed two important declarations: the Croatian Declaration on Open Access (2012) and the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age (2015). Following the principles of open access and open educational resources, SRCE has adopted its own policy and guideline document “Open Access Policy” on September 3, 2014.

SRCE’s logo for resources openly available

SRCE contributes to the culture and practice of open access in Croatia by maintaining several services, such as: HRČAK – Portal of Scientific Journals of Croatia, DABAR – System of Digital Academic Archives and Repositories, ARA – Aggregator of Croatian Open Repositories and Public Data Collections – service used to permanently store various data collections of interest for the academic and educational community or general public.

Scheme of the System of Digital Academic Archives and Repositories and possible objects that can be stored (multimedia, thesis, monographs, primary data, papers, final works) into it

Following the Open Access Policy, SRCE provides an open access to a number of educational resources developed within the framework of SRCE’s educational activities (e.g. E-learning Centre, IT courses), expert analysis and policies in the various fields of ICT research and application, and articles and papers published or presented in journals and conferences. The resources are available under the Creative Commons licences.

In March 2015, SRCE participated at the Open Education Week and, for that occasion, produced a video on the topic of OER with an aim to promote and raise awareness about Open Education Resources in Croatia.

Video is available in Croatian at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uce5PuJC4ic.

SRCE is responsible for the national e-learning platform Merlin (http://merlin.srce.hr) where higher education institutions in Croatia can open their e-learning courses and get the support in development and advancement of their e-courses. The e-learning platform is based on the open source system Moodle and is home to more than 4.000 e-courses each academic year. There are also other e-learning platforms maintained by educational institutions.

Preface of the e-learning platform Merlin

The Catalogue of the Higher Education Institutions’ E-courses in Croatia (http://katalog-e-kolegija.srce.hr/) was launched in June this year by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport. The Catalogue is the central place where are all information about higher educations’ e-courses in Croatia are stored. SRCE is responsible for maintaining the catalogue and providing support to institutions.

Even in primary and secondary education there are examples of educational systems and initiatives that contribute to the openness of education. The Ministry of Science, Education and Sport’s initiated the establishment of the National Portal for Distance Education “Nikola Tesla” (https://tesla.carnet.hr/) as the repository of educational resources in the field of Science (Math, Chemistry, Physics and Biology) to help elementary and high school teachers in preparation of their teaching materials. The Portal and an e-learning platform based on Moodle which is used for the development of e-courses in schools are maintained by the Croatian Academic and Research Network CARNet (http://www.carnet.hr/en). CARNet also participates in the international project Open Discovery Space (http://opendiscoveryspace.eu/), together with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing of the University Of Zagreb, in order to integrate e-learning into the educational process of 50 Croatian schools.

Massive Open Online Courses are at their beginning in Croatia. Last year CARNet designed the MOOC on Moodle in Croatia in which participated about 400 participants. By the end of September 2015 the MOOC in Croatian titled “ePortfolio Self-Development Study” prepared by the Europortfolio initiative (http://www.eportfolio.eu/) will be launched.

In January 2014, Ministry of Science, Education and Sport invited all schools to join European initiative “Opening Education” and to actively participate in the “Open Education Europe” portal by sharing their educational resources.

Future of Open Education in Croatia

There is still a lot to be done in Croatia in order to raise awareness on the importance of free and open access to education and knowledge. What is needed and can be done today in Croatia science and education system level, but at the institution level as well?

1. To discuss about open access and open educational resources, and stating in the policy documents that they are positive and desired practice, which will be systematically promoted and originated
2. To ensure that all publicly funded educational resources are openly available
3. To plan and provide resources for the further development of the high-quality open educational resources
4. To continue development and increase the availability of the modern e-infrastructure on all levels so open educational resources and other resources can be easily developed, produced and accessed
5. To develop digital educational resources, tools and methods for the use of ICT in education and to train teachers, especially in digital skills.

Recently the EC released new priorities for European Education and Training 2020 (http://ec.europa.eu/education/news/2015/0901-et2020-new-priorities_en.htm):

1. Relevant and high-quality skills and competences for employability, innovation, active citizenship;
2. Inclusive education, equality, non-discrimination, civic competences;
3. Open and innovative education and training, including by fully embracing the digital era;
4. Strong support for educators;
5. Transparency and recognition of skills and qualifications; and
6. Sustainable investment, performance and efficiency of education and training systems.

This is one more incentive, for all of us, to modernize school and university curricula, to provide education which will enable students to become employable and to gain skills and competencies needed for jobs today and those that will be created tomorrow. As the new technologies provide opportunities to learn anywhere, anytime and from anyone there is a strong potential for widening the access to education and increase the diversity of student population. New and innovative technologies are already starting to facilitate better quality of teaching and learning, as educational resources from around the world become more freely accessible and interactive media for learning is more often employed. It is necessary that all participants of the educational process start to be aware of the benefits that open education and open access can bring to them. Successful examples can contribute to awareness, but for significant changes, systematic approach is required at all levels.

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