On our continuing Open Education from Around the world trail Cengiz Hakan Aydin is leading us out of Europe with his post on Turkey. The Republic of Turkey is located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia making it a country of significant geostrategic importance! It is famous for both historical reasons (the Ottoman Empire, palaces, sultans) and for edible pleasures (Turkish delight, baklava and coffee)!

Cengiz Hakan Aydin, PhD, is currently serving as the Dean in the Faculty of Economics (open and distance learning institution) of Anadolu University, Turkey. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, such as Instructional Design, Designing Open and Distance Learning, and Trends in ODL. His research interest focuses on design and development of open and distance learning environments, social aspects of online learning, technology integration into learning environments, evaluation of technology interventions, e-learning in workplaces, adult learning, and educational communications. He served as the President of the International Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), as one of the board member of the International Council for Educational Media (ICEM) and of the International Division of AECT. Professor Aydin has been a member of editorial boards of the journals, the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), and Educational Media International (EMI). He is currently serving as a member of the steering committee of OpenupEd, a MOOC platform based in Europe. You can contact him using chaydin@anadolu.edu.tr or on Twitter uisng @chaydin.

Many have agreed that the Open Education Resources (OER) movement is a consequence of the Open Education trend started with the establishment of Open University of UK in late 1960s. Since then, a number of open universities in various countries have been built and provided learning and/or earning a degree opportunity to those non-conventional learners. Due to the increasing the need for more open and flexible education opportunities as well as boosting number of non-conventional learners, and some other developments, opening up education through information and communication technologies has become one of the major trends in Higher Education. It is worth noting the success in open courseware (OCW) movement, initiated first by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002, fostered the OER initiatives and grasped the attention of major international institutions, such as UNESCO. Later, the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) contributed the popularity of OER movement.

Open Education has a long history in Turkey, rooting back to 1930s. However, the most sustainable Open Education initiative is the establishment of the open Higher Education programs of Anadolu University. The university first launched two four-years long undergraduate programs in 1983 and since then have been providing open and distance learning opportunities to millions of those unconventional as well as conventional students via its distance degree and certificate programs, MOOCs and OER. Anadolu University is currently serving 1.4 million active students via 17 bachelors, 34 two-years long associate degree (www.anadolu.edu.tr/acikogretim/turkiye-programlari) and 26 certificate programs (esertifika.anadolu.edu.tr), and 65 MOOCs (akadema.anadolu.edu.tr). Anadolu University is also supporting and participating Europe based open education projects, such as OpenEducationEuropa project (www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/) initiative of the European Union, HOME (home.eadtu.eu) and OpenupEd (www.openuped.eu), a project of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU).

Turkish Open Courseware project: Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA)

Another OER project, inspired by MIT’s one, is the Turkish Open Courseware project. The project initiated in 2006 by the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA), a semi-governmental institution. TUBA intended to bring together the major Higher Education institutions in Turkey to open up some of their courses. A working group built and some funds acquired from the State Personal Development Agency. During 2007-2012, course materials belong to 85 courses in varying fields developed and still open to the public. According to recent figures up to May 2015, approximately 1.2 million individual users accessed these course materials. More information can be found here (www.acikders.org.tr). Meanwhile Anadolu University decided to open up its course materials designed and developed for its distance students to all via a new platform, entitled as YunusEmre. More than 2.5 million of users accessed the course materials related to 167 courses between 2007-2013.

Universiteplus

In Turkey, the MOOCs movement has shown its impact a bit later then rest of the world. Although several individual attempts launched before, major initiatives, Anadolu University’s AKADEMA (akadema.anadolu.edu.tr) and Atatürk University’s ATADEMIX (atademix.atauni.edu.tr), were introduced in November 2014. However, the courses started in early 2015. Currently there are 65 courses offered in Akadema and 13 courses offered in Atademix. Akadema uses a customl developed platform while Atademix uses a version of Moodle. Anadolu University mainly transferred its distance course materials into MOOCs in Akadema and according to recent numbers approximately 2000 people completed these courses. This is almost 4 percent of the registered users. Meanwhile all of these courses in Akadema and Atademix are in Turkish, and several courses in Turkish can also be found in Coursera. Additionally, couple entrepreneurs intended to create a Coursera like environment in Turkey, entitled as UniversitePlus (www.universiteplus.com). Currently they offer 32 courses from different universities.

Atademix

Although Open Education has a long history in Turkey, only a few initiatives have been effective, efficient, engaging and enduring. The major barriers of the development of Open Education in Turkey are similar to the ones in other countries. Lack of awareness and support from government and other decision makers, shortage of expertise in design and delivery of online courses, cost of technology and expertise, professors’ resistance can be listed as the major barriers.

Continuing our theme of European countries today we have a post on Open Education in the Republic of Moldova. Moldova is another Eastern European and former Soviet republic country and shares linguistic and cultural roots with neighbouring Romania.

Cristina Lisii, Dmitri Belan and Alex Oprunenco from the United Nations Development Programme and working on the MiLab (Moldova Social Innovation Hub) Project explain current initiatives and future plans.

Reforming educational system is one of the critical challenges for the Republic of Moldova and it is at the cornerstone of the country’s development agenda. However, as challenges abound, the question we at the MiLab (Moldova Social Innovation Hub) are dealing with is “how we can best help reform the Ministry of Education with relatively limited resources?” For us, the answer is: by advancing open education through civic engagement in outreach.

MiLab: changing the ways we educate…

Moldova Social Innovation Hub aims to establish a Social Innovation Hub, which will act as a multilateral platform to engage actors from different sectors (public, private, non-profit, etc.) to seek and experiment with innovative approaches to the society’s problems. Ultimately, the Hub will develop solutions that have been tested on the ground and co-developed with strong involvement of beneficiaries and are ready to be scaled-up in extended environments. The project started in September 2014 and will end in August 2015.

To fit well into the bigger reform picture MiLab has established close cooperation with the Moldova Ministry of Education and we ensure that each priority we set for our work in education resonates and supports what Ministry is doing.

MiLab on Facebook

The list of priorities thus far has included:

1. Open Challenge: This was a good way to step into the field and test what is the level of people’s interest and desire to get involved in changing the current education system. We have asked people: how we can make skills acquired at school more relevant for the students? The answers ranged widely. We heard from teachers, parents, students, pupil’s associations, businesses, etc. As a result, five most voted ideas were rewarded with symbolic prizes, but also we have offered to assist in implementing three of them. This experience showed there are many good ideas are out there in the system, and if the right enabling environment is created they will come forward.
2. Online and mobile evaluation of textbooks: Moving beyond the traditional is always difficult. In Moldova, the revision of textbooks has exclusively been a prerogative of a limited group of ‘experts’ in education. Together with the Ministry we decided to ask for feedback a larger and more diverse group of users – teachers, pupils and parents. We have developed an online questionnaire with an interactive and user-friendly interface. Moreover, the form was accessible on most of devices, i.e. smart-phones preferred by students and PCs by teachers. We also wanted it to be inclusive, so the feedback form was accessible in both Romanian and Russian. While the number of respondents turned out to be smaller than the Ministry would have wanted, this exercise was the first try to reach online its stakeholders and open a frank discussion on a topic, previously in the realm of few.
3. Using on-line games for education: The problem in much of our traditional education is that information is presented as a one-way street: the message is supposed to travel, unencumbered, to the receiver. But it is not the best way to ensure that information is received and retained. Time and again, it seems that game can be part of the solution. In our game the players had to answer questions related to economic and social situation in the country, legislative framework and strategic policy frameworks. To be able to answer the players had to follow the links to the specific info or data sets. So besides having fun, you can also learn in the game. As you will see we are set to explore this approach further.

Evaluating a pilot version of EduSoft contest, Photo credit: UNDP Moldova

Future plans

Starting in 2014, more and more schools in Moldova are computerized and modernized, investing in hardware and smart boards. The efficacy of such an approach, however, is limited as long as there is a shortage of digital content or teaching material that is adapted to Moldovan curricula. Thus, together with a group of students who came up with the idea, we decided to organize a one-month hackathon to develop educational applications for the study of mathematics in schools. What is new about this hackathon is that it will bring together very unlikely partners- IT developers as mentors, mathematics teachers as experts and students studying IT as developers. We are working right now on organizing the contest and eager to see what will be the results afterwards.

Making school budgeting accessible: With the most recent education reform, many schools have gained autonomy in their financial management, thus adding to the tasks and necessary skill set of school directors things like procurement management and budgeting. While they receive intermittent training from budgeting experts (part of a World Bank sponsored project), they still struggle with some aspects of it. Together with the Ministry we decided to review the procedures involved in school budgeting from the vantage point of directors and identify how we can simplify or explain them in a more accessible, “human” way.

All in all, after less than a year of our work in MiLab we are strong believers that big improvements can be made through users involvement blended with new technology solutions.

From one side of Europe to the other…this week we have an Open Education story from Lithuania. Lithuania is a former Soviet bloc nation that that is known for its beautiful capital: Vilnius, amazing medieval castles and fantastic scenery. A little known fact – in 2011 Lithuania ranked first worldwide for internet upload and download speed!

Airina Volungeviciene provides us with a historical perspective on how openness and OER have evolved in Lithuania over the last few years. Airina is the Director of Innovative Studies Institute at Vytautas Magnus University and President of Lithuanian Distance and e-Learning (LieDM).

A Historical Perspective

The concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) has a very specific development in Lithuania. The concept of openness of education has historical roots. Education was open in the country for many years, in the sense that it was free. The concept of open resources was also embedded in the tradition, as all the resources were the public good for many decades in the country or were supposed to be provided by education institutions for free.

Trakai, Vilnius County, Lithuania on Flickr, by Mindaugas Danys, CC-BY

On the one hand, education was free and accessible to everyone, on the other hand – no one asked the question how open education was?

With the regaining of independence in Lithuania, educational resources started to be updated (we all believe towards the openness of their content). They continued to be provided for free at education institutions, but the time came when organisations faced difficulties with the availability of the resources in their hard form.

Possibilities created by new digital and online forms of the resources were met very enthusiastically. The case of Lithuania is a success case to develop good preconditions for OER: advanced ICT infrastructure established for distance learning resources development and broad band connection provided by the Lithuanian Academic and Research network. These preconditions were established by Lithuanian Government and the Ministry of Education and Sciences which launched the national projects to establish the infrastructure in the country suitable to broadcast and access high quality education content throughout the country (started in 1998). These decisions had many important positive effects in terms of preparation of education organization for online learning, development of professional competences of staff, experimentation of the new forms of education.

However, the content created using huge technological infrastructure networks was closed in many ways: it was used for dedicated study programs within the closed virtual learning environments; digitalised content was not available for accessing in terms of re-use, re-publish, re-design; copyright would raise more questions for the correct use of the resource rather than facilitated content use.

Free access did not mean openness at all: openness to the evaluation of the resources, re-use of the resources, re-publishing and editing of the resources. But most important – questioning the contents of the resources.

It should be acknowledged here that the global concept of OER came to Lithuania from Scandinavia with the advent of the first OER focused projects: Nordplus Horizonal program NORDLET project and eContentPlus program OpenScout project. These projects introduced the long – time awaited discussion – are the resources that we can openly (freely!) access open educational resources?

Unesco Institute for Information Technologies in Education coordinated the project on Open Educational Resources (since 2009) which tendered a Lithuanian case study on the state of the art of OER in Lithuania. The study was implemented by researchers at Vytautas Magnus University and produced the results which demonstrated that huge repositories that contain openly accessible content and publications for education organizations in Lithuania are not OER repositories. Surprisingly enough, the study revealed that school sector has the best existing examples of OERs and the best OER repository for secondary school education available in the country.

The most important infrastructure projects were of huge importance for the country, but the movement of OER was still to come: Lithuanian educators had to learn the new concept of collaborative and open professional networking to establish open, free-licensed content and resources, the correct use, re-use and re-purposing of OER, the development of open educational practices and cooperative learning. Still, in the past five years, there is confusion existing in education organizations in terms of OER, OEP, open access, open society, and open education. But this is challenging and needs time.

Opening Up Education

European Commission launched the communiqué of Opening Up Education, and national priorities started integrating the concept of open education more actively. This was a very important moment. The Ministry of Education and Science launched many projects to meet the initiative of open education, and the best examples again can be attributed to school education.

Universities and higher education institutions have already developed open resources (with different levels of openness). The phenomenon of MOOCs introduced large discussions and confusions in the country and was often confused with OER phenomenon as such. However, the majority of higher education organizations discussed the strategies for opening in terms of scalability and study program portfolios. The tendency which is quite evident is not to follow a quite segmented MOOC format (opening one or two courses for the society), but rather to establish a more consistent and study program portfolio covering option of open education. Recent discussions imply the question of scalability and the variety of forms. But universities are on their way.

Looking back at the year 2008 when the first OER project NORDLET reached Lithuania, the global concept of OER has found its place in Lithuania. The term “Atviri švietimo ištekliai” was coined, the study and recommendations were developed, the policy makers integrated the concept of opening education in strategic programs and projects calls. Schools do have and do use OER from the best and the oldest repository at http://portalas.emokykla.lt. New repositories appear and their developers learn and share their experiments with others.

Lithuanian Distance and eLearning (LieDM) association embracing secondary schools, vocational education and training organizations, adult learning centres, and higher education institutions organizes trainings and seminars for teachers all over Lithuania. The topic of OER is among prior demanded topics of organizations. Teachers need to learn to work in an open education way. Organizations need to find scalable strategies to integrate new open education forms. The international conference “Open professional collaboration” organized by LieDM association and Vytautas Magnus University in 2015 is the event dedicated to meet the aims of opening up of education organizations.

The concept of openness found many ways that were integrated in higher education. One of them – virtual mobility – bringing the best international studies with full credit transfer and recognition, using OERs in higher education – both, open and closed virtual learning environments. Study programs at universities introduced the curriculum subject “Open Educational Resources“.

OER Projects in Lithuania

Several projects should be mentioned here that have considerable input towards embedding of OER into education ‘direct’.

UbiCamp project (526843-LLP-1-2012-1-ES-ERASMUS-ESMO) established open educational practices when universities started opening up their study resources as OERs on the basis of learning outcomes. Universities opened up their study forms to meet virtual mobility requirements, as well as to allow consistency of OER in terms of study subjects (e.g. http://openu.vdu.lt ). Even though small attempts, the initiatives contributed to the shift in attitude and study forms.

Another Erasmus+ project “Opening Universities for Virtual Mobility – OUVM” (2014-1-LT01-KA203-000550) developed the idea further on also preparing training material for teachers on OER and Creative commons, with the aim to train teachers on how to integrate OERs into international virtual mobility in university studies.

Erasmus+ project “Open Professional Collaboration for Innovation – OpenPROF” (2014-1-LT01-KA202-000562) educates adult educators, university teachers, company trainers and CVET target groups to collaborate in developing and re-using OERs. Even though a lot of issues seem to be clear and easy for the advanced professionals, very simple and very important challenges – like creating editable versions of OERs, with collaborative options using ICT – evolve and are already solved by OpenPROF.

Erasmus+ project “Open Educational Ideas – 2” facilitates collaboration of educators providing collaborative idea development space. The space created allows development of editable versions of open educational ideas and resources and allows collaboration on OERs.

OER pilot 3ECTS course

The Open Educational Resources (OER) pilot was a 3ECTS course delivered by 10 teachers from 6 countries in 2014. 18 students from 7 universities participated in the pilot. Vytautas Magnus University coordinated virtual mobility course design and virtual mobility implementation. There were 3 target groups selected for pilot (e-learning centre staff members, teachers and trainers, and students of different levels of study programs), because the topic of the curriculum was considered as transversal on. Course designers and teachers agreed that though the topic of the course has great potential to be very popular among the audience, the teachers agreed that they should limit the number of registered participants per institution, allowing only 5 places per institution.

A more detailed presentation of the pilot is available on Slideshare. A full report on the pilot is also available.

And of course, there are more important projects and initiatives that are running on, and which will be started in the near future.

To summarise, it should be acknowledged that opening up education is possible only with the agreement of all the stakeholders: policy makers, decision makers, education organisations, teachers and learners. All are evoked here in Lithuania and are tuned into the opening up. This is a different opening up from that was perceived for many years – the Open Education which allows open content, open society, open evaluation and feedback, open licencing, open networking, open learning and open professional collaboration and development.

The Republic of Macedonia (R. Macedonia) is a country located in the central Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It declared independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991 and is famous for mosiacs, folk music and being Mother Theresa’s birthplace!

Elena Stojanovska, MPA, Coordinator for project development and writing, NGO Center for Local Initiatives (CLI), R. Macedonia, has kindly written a blog post for us about exciting Open Education activities that are currently happening in Macedonia.

Elena has 6 years of experience working in the non-profit sector on implementation of projects related to entrepreneurship support and development, funded by USAID, European Union, Netherlands Government, etc. At CLI, she is one of the proponents of Open Education and was the initiator of a project on promotion of Open Educational resources (OER) through training using OER in the teaching process in R. Macedonia. She has also facilitated Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). She was part of the team who created the first MOOC in Macedonia on entrepreneurship topic in the frames of the project: “Why go abroad, when you can stay and invest in your country” supported by the US Embassy in Macedonia and implemented by the NGO CEFE Macedonia. Elena blogs on the CLI blog: http://clibt.blogspot.com/.

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In R. Macedonia there are significant efforts for development of Open Education and still work to be done. The free access to educational content should be widened and more organisations and educational institutions should digitalise their materials. Beside further development of the already existing projects for Open Education, there is a need for more intensive promotion of the benefits of using OER and how to create new one, publishing them in one place. In addition still the culture for sharing OER is not well developed and the institutions rarely have the capacity for independent development of OER. There are some exceptions, such as personal blogs, wikispaces, web sites, forums by some authors but they are difficult to find and the publication is not according to the international standards.

OER in Schools

Project for free textbooks website

The Government of R. Macedonia in 2006 started with implementation of the project Computer for every child in the state primary and high schools which was one step towards the process of Open Education. The Ministry of Information Society and Public Administration (MISPA) in 2010 developed the Project for free textbooks, web portal where the students from primary and high schools can find text books in electronic format. In 2010 MISPA developed the Strategy for development of e-resources 2010-2015 that had the goal to define the aims and benefits and give directions for successful and quality inclusion of the ICT technologies in the educational process.

In addition during 2009 and 2010 MISPA in cooperation with Intel company developed the portal skoool.mk where different educational tools, notes, multimedia classes, simulations were structured in categories according to different grades in primary school. Unfortunately this web page does not exist anymore, although it was important step towards open education. Furthermore the Edubuntu educational software was implemented in order to increase the quality of the informational technology in the educational process. There was training for teachers in primary and high schools how to use this software in cooperation with USAID Project on Primary Education (PEP). The ToolKID software was the first educational software in Macedonia for lower primary grades. Later the website ToolBox was developed (different instruction materials on several subjects) representing important step in the OER development. This website does not function now either, but the youtube channel of the PEP project is available with the video materials.

OER in Higher Education

When we are talking about OER in Higher Education, there is a way to go. Some faculties use the Moodle platform for delivering their courses and the process of using and creating of OER should be enhanced because rarely the Universities offer their courses, textbooks, materials online and for free. Taking into consideration the increasing offer of MOOCs from different universities worldwide, the Macedonian Universities need to take more pro-active approach for using and creation of OER.

An important project that was started by the Metamorphosis Foundation (non-profit organization) from 2011 and is still in progress is the project: Open Educational Resources whose goal: “is to contribute to the development of critical thinking and democratization in Macedonia through the constructive use of new technologies as tools to increase the quantity and quality of educational, scientific and academic e-content. Particularly, the project has a specific aim to raise the awareness and build the capacity of the academia for creating and using open educational resources.” (Metamorphosis Foundation, 2015). In this regard, the web page: www.oer.mk was developed serving as a central point for different OERs divided in certain categories. In the frames of this project, there has been organized number of presentations, discussions, round tables, conference with interested parties, significantly contributing to the development of open education.

Alliance for OER was founded by the individuals, organisations, institutions with main goal of raising the awareness of the academic public for creation and using OER in Macedonia. The Alliance in 2013 announced the Declaration for OER gathering support for improvement of the open education in Macedonia, increasing the quality of the whole education system.

A positive example of Open Education is the first produced Macedonian MOOC on topic “Entrepreneurship in Macedonia” in the frames of the project “Why go abroad, when you can stay and invest in your country” supported by the US Embassy in Macedonia. The implementer of the project NGO CEFE Macedonia together with actors from different sectors created the MOOC and the videos would be included in the Coursera platform as a part of the online course: “Beyond Silicon Valley-Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies“ offered by Prof. Michael Goldberg from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Ohio.

Activities of the Center for local Initiatives Macedonia

The NGO Center for Local Initiatives (CLI) Bitola is local NGO located in Bitola-the second largest city in Macedonia. It was founded in 2002 working mainly in the educational sector. CLI started with promotion of OER in the beginning of 2015. In these terms CLI was part of the global Open Education Week (9-13.03.2015) promoting different open educational resources on the blog and facebook fan page and holding presentation of OER in front of faculty students. Regarding the OER, CLI is more focused on promotion of the MOOCs, how they can be used and what are the benefits.

Training on use of OER, high school SABA

Another project was promoting the use of OER in front of teachers of Private high school academy SABA Macedonia implementing training program for Project Management using OER. (February March 2015). By combining traditional way of training delivery with OER (the online course for PM was offered in the frames of Udemy platform) we promoted how teachers can combine blended learning with traditional teaching methods. Also on 14^th of May, CLI hold training for e-resources and OER for the team of the Student Dormitory in Veles Municipality who is one of the biggest dormitories in Macedonia, how the staff can use OER, especially MOOCs in front of their students and how to integrate in their everyday work and in their educational programs.

Promotion of OER in American Corner
Photo credit: American Corner Bitola

In addition, in cooperation and with support of the American Corner Bitola on 26^th of May 2015 in the premises of Corner, CLI gave a presentation on OER and its benefits for the wide public. Therefore the participants from different profiles and professional background had the possibility to hear more about OER, how they can use it, how they can engage in creating OER, what are the advantages, etc. Also during July, in the premises of the Corner we facilitated sessions of the MOOC “Project Management: The basics for success” offered on Coursera platform. There were 5 facilitated sessions, one per each week where the participants were acquainted with platforms offering MOOCs and the course material was followed in a group.

To sum up, the concept of OER is still at the beginnings in Macedonia; in future it needs better coordination between different activities, institutions and further development. The sustainability of some projects is a challenge in this regard; the process of promotion should be enhanced and Universities should use more the benefits of OER and start publishing their own OER. In these terms also the cross sectorial cooperation should be enhanced in order with joint efforts to continue developing Open Education in Macedonia.