Taking action in the area of Open Education
Open Education is a relatively new area of focus for SPARC Europe. Our sister organisation in the United States, SPARC US, has, however, made significant strides in OE advocacy in recent years, and has produced related resources and materials.
In 2018 we established the European Network of Open Education Librarians. It has its own strategy. This group meets every month online. Join us here oer@sparceurope.org
Our work is focussed on helping implement the UNESCO Recommendation on OER.
Before we decide to go in a specific direction with Open Education, we asked for your help to understand Open Education practices in academic libraries in Europe.
In order to maintain our alignment with the UNESCO OER Recommendations, we conduct annual surveys to understand action in Open Education in European libraries of Higher Education and the efficacy of our work. We published our latest report on Academic Library engagement in Open Education in October 2022. This will guide our work in the coming months. A fourth survey is planned for 2023.
Much of our work is funded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation; we are very grateful to their support.