Abstract:

Introduction:
Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of digital distance learning tools such as Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), all of which present traditional education systems and structures with exciting new opportunities, but also some challenges. Properly exploited, these new resources thus have a huge amount to offer: they can promote knowledge-sharing and intercultural communication; they can broaden access to education, by enabling teaching and learning to take place virtually anywhere; and in their ability to reach large numbers of learners, including by creating virtual communities of common interest, they can increase cost-efficiency. Furthermore, by their very nature they can promote innovation in education and new methodologies. At a broader level, the EU is in danger of lagging behind other regions of the world in this field. Therefore there is a need for thinking “out of the box” and try to create large scale and nationwide research and testing environments.

European Member State Case Study:
A. Understanding the needs for OpeningupSlovenia
Against this background, and in the light of the European Commission's recent communication on “Opening up education”, Slovenia is proposing a unique in the world state-scale experimental research environment in support of typical and innovative open educational resources, learning environments, applications and services for an Open Education member state. Slovenia’s strategic orientation is to fully exploit and experiment on the idea behind the communication from the EC on a complete member state level, taking in consideration all national educational institutions and stakeholders. Since Slovenia has an impressive backlog in open education practices, it wishes to additionally and actively contribute to online education by becoming a state-scale test bed for research and ICT deployment. The main building blocks are the UN awarded VideoLectures.Net website and FP7 research projects and AI based intelligent tools.

B. Goals of OpeningupSlovenia
The main goal of the initiative is to follow as closely as possible and go beyond the European Commission’s communication which sets out a European agenda for stimulating high-quality, innovative ways of learning and teaching through new technologies and digital content. OpeningupSlovenia is therefore a bottom-up created and top-down supported new and innovative initiative in which Slovenia as a first European member state will attempt to create a unique nationwide research environment in open education. This test-bed comprises of a coalition of all Slovenian universities, compulsory and vocational education institutions with technical, research and industry partners. The objective is to explore means for a fully-fledged open educational system in synergy and parallel with the formal one, develop innovative projects and apply for European Commission funds related to ICT and new aspects of open education. For this purpose OpeningupSlovenia partners will separately or as a consortium apply for funds through the new programmes Erasmus+, Horizon 2020 and Structural Funds, and will at the same time continue to develop projects with their own resources. The initiative involves 12 participants from industry, academia, research, education and government and was given support by 40 institutions and entities from 18 countries in Europe and outside the European Union.

Keywords:

ICT, information technologies for education, open education, OER, big data in education, learning analytics, automatic translation and transcriptions.