On the first day of its annual conference, the OpenCourseWare Consortium announced its new name: the Open Education Consortium. The change reflects the organisation’s commitment to “expand access to education and promote open sharing of knowledge.”
The Open Education Consortium is one of the foremost actors in the field of Open Educational Resources (OER). More...

Leaders from the higher education, learning analytics, and open source fields met at the Open Learning Analytics (OLA) Summit last week to discuss the emerging possibilities of learning analytics combined with open learning/technologies/research.
The summit focused on open system architectures and how teachers and learners can benefit from learning analytics tools to improve the learning experience. More...

In the spirit of embracing new technologies that support open learning and informal education, the Open Education Challenge is offering a series of Open Badges to its participants!
The first one, which is already unlocked, is the Candidates' badge. It is a Mozilla Open Badge which belongs to eligible applicants of the Challenge and certifies their status as a candidate. Open Badges are a form of digital certification that any organisation can create and issue to certify a specific skill or achievement. Badges can be displayed it on a website or social networking sites, for example. When someone earns a new badge, they add it to their Mozilla Backpack along with badges from other sources to show their full skill set. More...

The European Commission's Opening up Education initiative in a nutshell
The main goal of this initiative is to stimulate ways of learning and teaching through ICT and digital content, mainly through the development and availability of OER. Amongst its actions, the most important one is to change the role of digital technologies at school. All the actions within the initiative are put in place with the hope that they help attain the ultimate objective, namely to boost competitiveness and growth at the European level.
Opening up Education calls for EU-level cooperation to push reforms towards the adoption of open learning environments as drivers to enhance digital skills both for pupils and teachers, and in education in general. Another major concern of the European Commission, stated in this initiative and in alignment with the Open Education Europa portal, is to be able to support the deployment and availability of digital technology and content.
This initiative addresses several educational difficulties at the European level. Europe is falling behind in the digital sphere; the great majority of schools are not digitally equipped and their students are not taught by digitally confident teachers, rather teachers who mainly use ICT to prepare their teaching but not as a skill for students to develop in the classroom. In the background, remains the threat of facing a new digital divide between those who have access to innovative, tech-based education and the digitally excluded.
The solution lays in open technologies that grant access to education for everyone and allow:
- students to build knowledge from open and free sources other than their teachers and institutions, and with different methods;
- everyone to engage in learning/study groups, thus creating learning communities beyond their classrooms;
- make personalisation and customisation of education a much easier task;
- teachers to create communities of practice to exchange teaching materials and best practices;
- provide access to a wider range of educational resources across borders and languages.
The actions foreseen in this initiative hope to enable Europe to gain leadership in education, attract new talent, train its citizens with the relevant skills, and as a consequence fuel innovation, productivity and growth.
The Open Education Europa portal: a key player to improve visibility of high-quality European OER
The main goal of the Open Education Europa portal is to grant access to all existing high-quality European OER repositories in different languages in order to make them easily accessible for learners, teachers and researchers. The ultimate aim is to be able to foster the wide use and creation of OER in several languages, for all educational sectors and disciplines, and to help overcome the current fragmentation of European OER use.