Pockey Lam, the Vice President of Digital Freedom Foundation has kindly written a post for us introducing Education Freedom Day which will be taking place globally early next year.

The Open Education Working Group would really like to contribute something on the day. Do you have any ideas?? Maybe we could encourage people to share ideas on their favourite Open Educational Resources (OER) or exciting ways OERs are being used? Or we could have an online sprint working on the open education timeline or handbook? We’re also keen to see a registry created of OERs and open textbooks in use – so for example the Open Knowledge Foundation were involved in open textbook project, but alas are no more, though they are keen to support Open Doors activity. What about Curriculum mapping to OERs? Or ideas around OER data? Please do post your suggestions in the comments.

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Digital Freedom Foundation is pleased to be launching a new celebration around Free and Open Educational Resources called Education Freedom Day which will be celebrated on January 18th 2014 (Saturday).

There are nowadays hundreds of resources going from specific topics to complete curricula and targeting many different educational levels depending on what your focus is (school, university, life learning, in class or online). Some involve software and computer usage, but most cover all educational fields from agriculture to being a teacher or attending university. While projects tend to be country specific due to national curricula guidelines which need to be followed, it is usually easy (and definitely encouraged) to adapt the materials to your specific needs or language.

Open Educational Resources (OER) focuses on the class itself, its methodology and how to provide the necessary skills (theoretical reading, practice and tests) it does not however cover certification at all, as often this part is handled by the educational institutions themselves. Still some famous universities such as the MIT have embraced OER since 2002 and are providing their courses online. There are of course plenty more nowadays, giving the education body plenty of resources to reuse.

The strength of the courses is of course the ability to freely reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute, thus getting public and professional reviews and improvements of education materials, encouraging innovative ways to teach, lowering the cost of access to education in general, giving control to educators and overall contributing to making a more educated society.

We hope this celebration will provide a good opportunity for educational institutions, teachers, educators and professors to get together and make an update on any OER project they are involved with, and look at what they could be deploying for the next school year. Of course there will probably be many wondering what are Open Educational Resources, how to contribute or to start new initiatives. Well we hope this day will give them enough information to get started!

You can find more information on our website at www.educationfreedomday.org, register to create an event yourself and get your community involved in the effort, or simply look for events in your area at www.educationfreedomday.org/map.