OPEN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IN SCHOOL EDUCATION

“Openness” as buzz-word and challenge is currently high on the educational agenda in the European Union. Especially Open Educational Resources (OERs) and related services receive a high level of attention. In this sense, Open Educational Practices (OEPs) as any activity regarding the production, usage or re-usage of OERs, can be seen as the next step in the development.

ICT-driven OERs can enrich education regarding any subject and on any level. The UNESCO even assumes that OERs have the potential to fulfil the claim for educational justice in the world. OERs also help to keep pace with the development of today’s knowledge society. Processes to change national or regional curricula and contents of lectures and printed books often take too much time and thus, educational institutions hardly are able to meet the requirements.
In this situation, two research projects of the European Union aim to support stakeholders in school education:

a) Open Discovery Space – ODS (http://www.opendiscoveryspace.eu), with 52 partners from 21 European countries the largest e-Learning project ever launched by the European Commission. ODS is developing a multi-lingual web portal for the school sector that is designed to support its users (mainly teachers) regarding the accessibility, production, use, and adaptation of Open Educational Resources and to foster open practices/OEPs regarding the exchange of knowledge and experiences. ODS engages stakeholders in the production of user-generated educational activities in a socially-empowered, multilingual environment and empowers them with integrated access to eLearning resources from educational repositories around the world. In the first stage, the ODS-platform, as the central outcome of the project, has been implemented in and affiliated to more than 2000 schools throughout Europe and involved more than 10.000 teachers;
b) Inspiring Science Education – ISE (http://www.inspiringscience.eu) with 30 partners from 15 countries provides digital resources and opportunities for teachers to help them make science education more attractive and relevant to students’ lives by fostering inquiry-based learning and teaching. Through the ISE website and the activities organised by the partners, teachers are provided with learning design and scenarios of use, which includes meaningful orchestration and integration of learning technologies; they can then help students to make their own scientific discoveries, witness and understand natural and scientific phenomena and access the latest, interactive tools and digital resources from within their classrooms.

The presentation will summarise the main outputs and outcomes of the two projects in the middle of their project lifecycle, and will as well as describe possible impact on the educational systems in Europe.