Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh are pleased to launch the new publication Wikimedia in Education, a collection of case studies from practitioners across the UK who have successfully integrated Wikimedia into their courses.

Wikimedia is a valuable tool for education, enriching the student experience as much as it does the open web. Learning to contribute to Wikipedia, or Wikimedia’s other open knowledge projects, teaches students key skills in information literacy, collaboration, writing as public outreach, information synthesis, source evaluation and data science. It also develops an appreciation for the role and importance of open education. Of the 14 examples in this publication, 13 are from the higher education sector; however the resource has been designed for anyone involved in education. It will be of particular interest to teachers, lecturers and learning technologists involved in open pedagogy and course design, or who have an interest in library skills, innovative learning, working on the open web, co-creation, collaborative working, or digital skills.

The publication is free to download and openly licensed.

Speaking about the launch, Melissa Highton. Assistant Principal, University of Edinburgh says: “The University of Edinburgh has a long-standing commitment to open educational resources. We offer services, training and support to colleagues who open up their practice in a wide range of ways. Working in partnership with WikimediaUK is just one of the many successful projects we have. This publication serves to celebrate the great success we have had in embedding open knowledge activities into courses across the University. I encourage colleagues to take a look and think about how you can bring this sort of engagement with open information literacy into classrooms to encourage sharing, co-creation and real impact.”

Celebrating the importance of the work, Lucy Crompton-Reid. Chief Executive, Wikimedia UK, concluded: “As the national charity for the global Wikimedia open knowledge movement, Wikimedia UK works closely with the education sector to develop the use and recognition of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects as valuable tools for teaching and learning. The University of Edinburgh has led the way in this work and we are delighted to have collaborated with them on the creation of this new publication, which features case studies from across the university as well as some of our other UK education partners.”

If you have registered for OER20 you should have also received the following in your inbox…

Welcome back to the second day of the OER20 Online Conference, and we hope you enjoyed the programme on day one. It was an action packed day full of fantastic content and attendee participation and we now have over 1,000 participants registered.

We had many special moments yesterday, including the virtual workshop sharing the FemEdTech Quilt which was led by Frances Bell. Take a moment, watch the video.

Today we are celebrating Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh launching the new publication Wikimedia in Education, a collection of case studies from practitioners across the UK who have successfully integrated Wikimedia into their courses.

If you have missed any sessions yesterday which you would like to see, the recordings of webinars have been added to their relevant page linked from day one of the programme (open the session details and click ‘Watch Recording’).

If this is your first day participating or indeed if you’d just like the chance to wave hello, please join the welcome session at 9.00am (BST) [timezone conversion]. This is followed by

• 09.30 (BST) [tz conversion] – Keynote from Janneke Adema and Joe Deville; 
• 10.30 (BST) [tz conversion] – Keynote Tweetchat from @ZEMOS98 with the hashtags #OER20 #PoCare; and
• 16.30 (BST) [tz conversion] – Conference closing reflections

Here are also some quick reminders of how you can participate in OER20:

1. Find out what else is on and plan your schedule using the online programme
2. Set up your workspace and get comfortable – use the hashtags #OER20 #ThisIsMe
3. Get to know other #OER20 attendees with a little ‘Social Bingo‘ (visit the ‘share’ page and enter the password ‘takecare‘ allowing you to complete your profile. From the site you can also click ‘random person’ to meet a new OER20 attendee)
4. Read tips on how to get involved on our tips for participation page.
5. Want to carry on a discussion? Visit our Social Space and check the programme for suggested hashtags for social activities
6. If you are new to webinars or are looking for help with your set up, please see our Blackboard Collaborate Ultra Guide.

There is no fee to attend the online programme, however, should you wish to make a contribution towards your participation we welcome your support.

If you need assistance during the event, have a look at our help pages or please contact the conference helpdesk at helpdesk@alt.ac.uk.

Thank you for being part of the OER20 Online Conference!

Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh are pleased to launch the new publication Wikimedia in Education, a collection of case studies from practitioners across the UK who have successfully integrated Wikimedia into their courses.

If you have registered for OER20 you should have also received the following in your inbox…

A warm welcome to Day 1 of OER20 – ALT’s largest ever OER Conference. There is a fantastic schedule of webinars and pre-recorded sessions lined up and we are looking forward to two days of  exploring “The Care in Openness” together.

Key links:

• OER20 online programme
• Using Blackboard Collaborate Ultra
• Guidance for Presenters

We have over 900 participants registered and we are here to help you. If you can’t find the answers you are looking for via the help pages, please contact helpdesk@alt.ac.uk.

We recommend that you start by getting comfortable and setting up your personal space for the day ahead, we welcome you to share your set up with our community using the hashtags #OER20 and #ThisIsMe. If you are yet to do so you may also like to check the important information for attendees.  At 10am (BST) [timezone conversion], join the opening welcome from the OER20 Co-Chairs by clicking on the “Join Webinar” button or using this direct link (if the session reaches capacity you can watch via YouTube).

At 3.45pm (BST) [timezone conversion] the day 1 programme ends with our keynote from sava saheli singh. sava and Mia will be in conversation about what care and openness in education might look like during our current extraordinary times, especially in relation to the ramping up of surveillance and criminalization, as well as the potential normalization of surveillance capitalism as more populations move online to access… everything. Join sava saheli singh and Mia Zamora by clicking on the “Join Webinar” button or using this direct link (if the session reaches capacity you can watch via YouTube).

We have a full programme of other sessions today, and you can find out what’s on and plan your schedule online using the online programme. All the sessions can be joined using the links within the online programme. Note: We’ve worked with our webhost to make sure the OER20 website remains online, but should you experience access problems we have a backup programme as a Google Sheet.

All of our webinars today are delivered using Blackboard Collaborate Ultra – if you are new to this tool, please see our Blackboard Collaborate Guide.

We also invite you to join our social space during our refreshment breaks, a virtual cafe where the coffee is as good as your imagination and there is always a free seat. Throughout the programme we’ve included suggested hashtags for those of you on Twitter including #OER20 #ThisIsMe to share pictures of where you’ll be joining OER20 from and #OER20 #BrownBag if you have anything to share over breakfast/lunch/dinner.

We have launched a SPLOT-site inviting all participants at the OER20 Conference to introduce themselves to the rest of the community (and the world!). Please make sure you go to https://oer20.socialbingo.oerconf.org/ and follow the instructions under the “share” tab (Password: takecare). You can also click ‘random’ to meet a random OER20 attendee.  If you are on Twitter, once you have contributed please share a link to your post along these two hashtags: #OER20 #OER20who.

Finally, tonight at 8pm (BST) [timezone conversion] we invite attendees to relax and enjoy the OER20 karaoke night. For those of you who would like to show off your musical abilities check your day 1 email for a link to join or if you prefer to sit back, relax and be entertained you can watch our OER20 stars at ds106.tv.

Together with the Conference Co-Chairs, Committee and everyone involved we thank you for being a part of the #OER20 Online Conference!

Welcome to #OER20, the 11th edition of this very special gathering.  This year’s conference will seek to bring care to the core of Open Education.

When we first decided upon the theme of care in summer 2019, we had no idea that “care” would take on the significance and sense of urgency it has now.  As we find ourselves facing a global pandemic together, our new and startling reality is upending just about everything we know. What is clear is that this moment demands a certain reconsideration of our responsibilities to ourselves and the communities we participate in. And it is also clear that our thoughtful use of online technologies and our openness in the age of “social distancing” will play a critical role in our response to the challenges we now face. As we are all struggling to cope, and as we make new decisions about our daily lives and daily responsibilities, the question of care must take center stage.

Care might seem at first glance a “soft” term, one we all may associate with nurturing and nourishment, kindness and consideration. And these associations with care are worthwhile. #OER20 will put the spotlight on both the value and limitations of care in Open Education, covering issues of privilege, equity, precarity, power relations, and public interest.  We hope to dig deeper and lend this term a kind of rigor not previously considered in depth in open education circles. The ultimate goal of caring dispositions, activities, and practices is to bring about well-being; to have an impact on our world that enables us “to live as well as possible” (Fisher & Trento 1990). Open educational and scholarly practices can be framed as a form of care when challenging models that prioritize individual gains or profit over the well-being of communities (Deville et al. 2018). But in the age of pandemic, of data surveillance and significant risk on the open web, how can we map out and give visibility to the critical components of care practices? How can we build sustainable communities, participatory practices, and civic engagement for the public good and a healthier democracy?

The image of our #OER20 soup has been drawn by the very talented Bryan Matthers after a conversation we had last summer. Soup is nourishing. It can fortify the body and soul. But soup has also been commodified, mass-produced and distributed. Andy Warhol famously appropriated the can of soup from mass media, questioning (and perhaps believing in) the scale-up of consumer culture. We see similar tensions when thinking about care in openness and education.

Our rapidly escalating global health crisis has clearly presented us with a situation that goes well beyond the usual challenges we tend to face when organizing an OER conference.  We acknowledge the unique occasion that these circumstances offer. A clear realization of the importance of caring pedagogies, and a deeper understanding of how open education can engender communities of care, is a critical step we are all taking together.

We also understand the deluge of online communication and labour that has hit this community since the universal “pivot” to online instruction.  We would be remiss if we did not mention the critical importance of self-care at this stage in our lives. No matter what your time zone please, pace yourself, be kind to yourself, and take what you can from this online version of the #OER20 conference.

It is true that this is a painful and fearful time, but in crisis, often we also have the chance to realign our commitments and priorities, and identify what is critical as we move forward with hope. Crisis literally means a turning point where things can get better or worse. Our hope is that new conversations will be engendered, new partnerships will be formed, and collaboration will help shape a pathway forward through this difficult time of unknowns.  We want to imagine the world that emerges from this crisis will be a more caring one. We are indeed encouraged by the enthusiastic response to the registration which is now above 8oo participants, and we take hope in that many of those now registered may be new to this conference and community. For now, we would like to take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge all of the hard work that has got us this far. We are indebted to ALT, the committee and the OER Community at large for helping shape this very special version of OER20!

Take care, stay safe, and many virtual hugs,

Daniel, Jonathan, & Mia

We have launched a SPLOT-site inviting all participants at the OER20 Conference to introduce themselves to the rest of the community (and the world!). Please make sure you go to https://oer20.socialbingo.oerconf.org/* and follow the instructions under the “share” tab (Password: takecare) before the start of the conference, as we will be relying on it to foster new conversations throughout the conference. In you are on Twitter, once you have contributed please share a link to your post along these two hashtags: #OER20 #OER20who.

*Thank you to Alan Levine (@cogdog) and Reclaim Hosting for helping with this space

ALT has been running fully online and blended events successfully for many years.

Our Online Winter Conference attracts hundreds of participants each year and we are now receiving many requests to share our expertise.

In this webinar ALT senior staff Martin Hawksey and Maren Deepwell will share their expertise on how we run online conferences,

lessons learnt and common considerations if you are about to embark on this yourself.

Openly sharing our approach to leading ALT's staff team is a key part of the work we do, and we publish a regular blog series on this topic, see https://marendeepwell.com/?page_id=2070.

This webinar is now open for registrations. The recording will be shared via the page, once the webinar has taken place.  

We will be holding weekly online Members' Assembly Drop-In’s to help members share expertise, ask questions and come together to support each other. These Drop In’s will take place in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra and are open to all. To join these no registration is needed. To join follow the weekly drop-in link . 

We support our community during this crisis. Our members are under exceptional pressure as institutions plan and implement social distancing measures within learning and teaching. We are regularly updating this page and linked resources. Find out more.  

BREAKING NEWS: The Open Space session, ‘Foraging for “good hybridity” in Third Spaces’ at #OER20, by Gill Ryan and myself, will no longer be run as a 30-minute synchronous session. Instead, we will facilitate a Twitter conversation throughout the conference, in which we all share our lived experience of #OER20 as a #HybridSpace.

Since we’re not going to be together in London…

The original plan was that we would all sit together in a physical space, and would discuss aspects of our educational practice in relation to some common polarities. We were then going to try to identify possible (existing or desired) transformative “Third Spaces” where a new culture, representing the best of both worlds, could be nurtured and given space to grow. Examples of common polarities and associated Third Spaces might be “traditional” vs “non-traditional” learners (Third Space = inclusive teaching?), or “teaching” vs “learning” (Third Space = co-creation?). Our session aimed to critically explore such Third Spaces, and would have involved us all in producing artsy-crafty flipbooks or other types of visual representations of these spaces. (Our trailer gives a flavour of this, with Gill showing some of her lovely handcrafted flipbooks!)

Now, however, a global pandemic has paradoxically plunged the conference into its own Third Space… If we imagine the First Space as the physical conference, which no longer exists, and the Second Space as our ideal (as individuals and a community) of what we hope to both “get out of” and “put into” the conference, then the Third Space is everyone’s actual lived experience of the online conference. This is a particularly timely concept to explore, as we all merge our work and home spaces to accommodate remote practice in the time of COVID-19.

Working from home (photo by Gill Ryan CC-BY-NC)

Third Spaces and hybridity 

The term “Third Space” is often attributed to postcolonial scholar, Homi Bhabha, who used it to refer to the ambiguity that is experienced when people from two or more different cultures meet, leading to the potential for what he called “creative heterogeneity” (Bhabha, 1994). Bhabha was interested in the unequal relations between “first world” and “third world” settings, between the coloniser and the colonised, and issues of power inherent in these relations. One of his central ideas was that the cultures of the colonisers and the colonised could be seen as existing in two separate spaces, but that an ambiguous “Third Space” could arise where these cultures merged at the margins, creating what he called a “hybrid” culture. In Bhabha’s view, the Third Space could challenge traditional power dynamics, and could be transformative for both cultures. Gill and I recently used the Third Space concept to explore aspects of agency amongst refugees and displaced learners in open and mobile learning (Witthaus and Ryan, in press), and will be sharing that when it’s published.

“Positive hybridity”, agency and #OER20 

Bhabha’s concept of hybridity has subsequently been challenged for glossing over the power inequalities that are embedded in relationships between social groups such as the colonisers and the colonised. For example, Per Bauhn, a Swedish philosopher, and Fatma Fulya Tepe, a Turkish scholar of gender issues, applied the concept of hybridity to a study of a community of Turkish refugees in the Netherlands, and concluded that, from the refugees’ perspective, there could be “good hybridity” and “bad hybridity” (Bauhn & Fulya Tepe, 2016). Most of the participants in this study said that they felt neither fully Dutch nor fully Turkish, and whilst for some, this ambiguity was experienced as disempowering, for others, being a member of both cultures was seen as augmenting their lives. The authors argued that the difference could be explained by ascertaining whether hybridity expanded or diminished an individual’s capacity for agency. By agency, they meant a person’s “capacity to realize her goals by means of her voluntary and purposive behaviour” (p. 353). The key question they asked themselves, therefore, was: “Did the person choose this hybridity, or was it imposed on them?” Where hybridity was chosen, it was accompanied by a sense of agency, and was experienced as positive. This chimes with bell hooks’ claim that, as a female African American from a working class family, she has purposely chosen to live her own life” in the margin”, rather than having marginality imposed upon her. She refers to that space in the margin as “a site of creativity and power… where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonised/coloniser” (hooks, 1989, p.23).

These notions of positive vs negative hybridity, choice vs imposition, and agency vs powerlessness, themselves seem to invite Third Space thinking, emphasising the political nature of hybridity in Third Spaces. Many people who find themselves in a hybrid situation did not choose that particular version of reality. All of us in the OER conference community will feel, at least to some extent, that the online format was imposed upon us. It will be a hybrid space that may contain possibilities for individual agency to be enhanced for some, or diminished for others. Some might find the virtual experience anxiety-provoking or stressful, while others experience it as “natural”. Some will be better equipped (both materially and in terms of digital literacies) to experience it positively. Some people may find they have accessibility needs that are better met online than face-to-face, or vice versa. There may be some participants who would never have joined in the face-to-face conference, but now find themselves becoming part of a whole new academic and social community. There will be as many different “lived experiences” of #OER20 as there are conference participants. Gill and I (and, we think, many other conference participants) will be intrigued to know: how is it going for you?

So… here’s the plan: a Twitter conversation about #OER20 and #HybridSpace

Starting now, and throughout the conference, we invite you to tweet, using the hashtags #OER20 #HybridSpace, posting anything you would like to share about your lived experience of the online conference. Let’s share photos of our home workspaces, our feet in our slippers, our cats on our keyboards, screenshots of our conference highlights, etc., as well as comments about how we are feeling about engaging online with the conference and the OER community. The creative element may not be entirely lost, as we can also use the Remixer flipbook to visualise our #HybridSpaces.

After #OER20 

After the conference, Gill and I will collate and share the visually rich expressions of our collective #HybridSpace as an #OER20 artefact, and will attempt to carry out a (totally unscientific!) analysis of the factors that appeared to contribute to people’s experiences of either positive or negative hybridity. In the meantime, we wish everyone happy hybridity, and invite you all to start tweeting about your lived experience of #OER20, using the hashtag #HybridSpace!

References

Bauhn, P. & Fulya Tepe, F. (2016). Hybridity and agency: Some theoretical and empirical observations. Migration Letters 3 (13), 350-358.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge. London: Routledge.

hooks, b. (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA.: South End Press.

Soja, E. W. (1998). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places. Capital & Class (Vol. 22). Cambridge MA: Blackwell.

Witthaus, G. & Ryan, G. (In press). ‘Supported mobile learning in the “Third Spaces” between formal and non-formal education for displaced people’, in Traxler, J. & Crompton, H. (eds). Critical Mobile Pedagogy: Cases of Inclusion, Development, and Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Author Info: Gabi Witthaus is a consultant at Art of E-learning. She is doing her PhD on the online engagement of refugees and asylum seekers in HE. She also works in the College of Arts & Law Digital Education Team at the University of Birmingham. Twitter: @twitthaus Blog: www.artofelearning.org 

The Call for Proposals for ALT’s Annual Conference 2020 is due to close Thursday 2nd April 2020.

All submissions are made via the ALT Online Submission Form

Call for Proposals open until 02 April 2020

Weekly online meeting with Jane Secker and Chris Morrision for those interested in talking about copyright challenges at the current time and how we can address them. Jane and Chris have published a page full of resources and a follow-up blog post. No registration is required to join this event which will be hosted in Blackboard Ultra. Follow this link to join the session at the appropriate time. A recording to this session will be posted on this page.

The webinar will run in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. If you have not used Collaborate Ultra before, it may be helpful to consult our webinar FAQs. 

Dear Members 

A personal message from Sheila MacNeill, Chair of ALT:

Weekly online meeting with Jane Secker and Chris Morrision for those interested in talking about copyright challenges at the current time and how we can address them. Jane and Chris have published a page full of resources and a follow-up blog post.. No registration is required to join this event which will be hosted in Blackboard Ultra. Follow this link to join the session at the appropriate time. A recording to this session will be posted on this page.

The webinar will run in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. If you have not used Collaborate Ultra before, it may be helpful to consult our webinar FAQs. 

What is global digital citizenship in light of the current crisis? What is its worth? Why do we need it? Just when we thought we were in a precarious place in our world with political disruptions and climate change, a new calamity has presented itself. This new blow, WHO-advised and government-led measures to slow/stop the spread of COVID-19, asks us to physically separate from one another. Although the official term is “social distancing”, the boom we are seeing to technologies and techniques that connect us through distance, shows that the social is not something that we can afford to give up – that it is indeed one of the most important things we cannot give up.

While we are asked to distance ourselves from each other, we are having a shared experience of confusion and chaos. Our schools are moving to remote instruction and work, our conferences are moving to online formats, our borders are further closing (this time, for the right reasons), and our governments scramble to improvise temporary solutions. Though this moment unites us on a global scale with shared fears, restrictions, and realities we also did not go into this moment on equal footing. For every threat of health, finance, and basic foundational structures of our societies, there are those among us who entered this moment more vulnerable than others and who will require varied types and different levels of care. And we should not forget that in a crisis, inequity is exacerbated.

At this intersection of equity and sociality over a distance, our work with Virtually Connecting over the last five years is loud in our minds. What started out as a selfish public experiment to try to virtualize social connections during an academic conference, quickly became a form of activism and public service. A public service that required digital literacy and digital citizenship and had underlying social justice goals. A public service that connected those from different corners of the globe, from diverse cultures, societies, religions, familial responsibilities, and financial situations. A public service paying special attention to the marginalized and recognizing the inequities in academic conferencing, who designs them, who can attend them, who builds social capital, and who gets excluded and left behind.

It was this focus… prioritization… preference …. through hospitality, that we soon recognized was at the heart of what we were trying to do. More than providing a technical solution for bridging an access gap, we were striving to make Virtually Connecting something that provides a supportive community that lets the more marginal groups know “we see you, we hear you, we recognize the value of you being here and we will do everything we possibly can to design and facilitate a space where your voice can be heard on your own terms, by involving you fully in designing and experiencing this process, by reframing it together as we grow”.

This framing now resonates strongly as we all pivot to emergency remote online education (where campuses are getting very sensitive about wording like “remote” and “online” – it is both!) all over the world, forced by circumstances from the COVID-19 pandemic. We need to remember all the marginalized students who will struggle with this crisis. Whether because of poorer internet infrastructure, loss of income, inaccessible online designs thrown together in a rush that don’t accommodate for various disabilities, increased family responsibilities from having kids suddenly homeschooling by force or caring for aging parents, or even just simply the impact on mental health and wellbeing, all of which will be unequally distributed locally and globally. As educators and educational developers, we are hyperaware of the added pressure and affective labor that is expected of us – and that again, we are not all equally challenged/harmed by this. No one signed up for this, but some will survive this more easily than others.

What drives Virtually Connecting is a similar hyperawareness of who is marginalized around academic conferences, and what we can do to help recenter them in spaces they have the right to be in. We termed this focus “Intentionally Equitable Hospitality” (IEH) in an article last year and though we named it and identified it, we avoided a hard definition. Hard definitions do not lend themselves to complexities and any work around equity is complex. IEH is bigger than a universal definition, it is even bigger than us; we are discovering it, evolving with it, more than defining it. For instance, in 2017 the U.S. travel bans gave our work new meaning. And we have been discovering, as Kate Bowles mentioned in her OER19 keynote, how our work may help some imagine how conferences could be different, to perhaps rethink our responsibility around our carbon footprint.

And in this moment, we are discovering how VC specifically, but also IEH more generally, is needed in the time of COVID-19. IEH is both an attitude and a way of behaving that is intentional about putting equity first in all our spaces where we host others. And its applicability to this moment in time can help us frame how we go forward from this moment on.

As educational developers, how are we prioritizing the needs of our faculty/teachers who are least familiar with technology? Are we insisting that administrators not force them to use technologies they would be too uncomfortable to use? (See Tannis Morgan’s post on using email as a teaching tool). What kind of care can we offer beyond the technical, especially to others who live completely alone and are now more isolated than ever? Can we avoid the normalization of surveillance technologies? Can we resist the scavenging corporate offers? Can we advocate for a more humane way of dealing with this crisis? How much ownership and agency can we offer faculty at a time when they may feel like they have very little control over what is happening to them?

As faculty/educators/teachers, are we aware of the technical capabilities of our students, whether they have their own devices at home, their internet speed, their family and financial situation, their learning needs? Without asking them to reveal everything, can we design kindly to ensure everyone has an opportunity to get through this in one piece? Can we remain open to the possibility that some will need support through this that is different from what we had anticipated (see Mays Imad’s touching story here)?

As a global community of educators suddenly all undergoing a similar transition in different contexts, how can we support each other to stay sane and remember what is most important? (See the continuity with care initiative by Maha Bali and Mia Zamora – starting with this crowdsourced curation on teaching online with care http://bit.ly/onlinewithcare ).

At a time of physical social distancing, we are just reminded of how important it is to keep multiple virtual channels open, to invite those most vulnerable to help design/choose those channels, and to decide for themselves what they want to do in those spaces, rather than have it imposed on them.

Virtually Connecting works because people who cannot attend many conferences chose how they wanted to participate virtually. And the VC community works across virtual spaces, text-based and asynchronous as well as video based and synchronous. Creating the right combination of these to sustain communities of educators and of students, separately or perhaps even together, might make all the difference. As long as we do it with Intentionally Equitable Hospitality.

We invite you to join our OER20 session to discover and learn about Intentionally Equitable Hospitality with us.

We will be holding weekly online Members' Assembly Drop-In’s to help members share expertise, ask questions and come together to support each other. These Drop In’s will take place in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra and are open to all. To join these no registration is needed. To join follow the weekly drop-in link . 

We support our community during this crisis. Our members are under exceptional pressure as institutions plan and implement social distancing measures within learning and teaching. We are regularly updating this page and linked resources. Find out more.  

As a result of the development of the COVID-19 outbreak, ALT had to cancel the face to face OER20 Conference in London, 1-2 April 2020 (12 March announcement). However, we are delighted that many of our session authors have kindly offered to adapt their sessions to be delivered as part of a reduced online OER20 programme running in place of the conference.

The fantastic online programme has now been published and you can visit the OER20 website to check the OER20 Programme for session timings and plan your participation. You may also Download a PDF Version of the programme.

For those not already registered to attend OER20 in person you can register now to receive updates and participate in the online OER20 programme. You can register for free, however, should you wish to make a contribution towards your participation and help support the conference we would hugely appreciate your assistance.

Note: If you were registered for OER20 in London, you will automatically be registered for online activities. You do not need to register again.

Please direct any questions you may have to helpdesk@alt.ac.uk and we will do our best to help.

Weekly online meeting with Jane Secker and Chris Morrision for those interested in talking about copyright challenges at the current time and how we can address them. Jane and Chris have published a page full of resources. No registration is required to join this event which will be hosted in Blackboard Ultra. Follow this link to join the session at the appropriate time. A recording to this session will be posted on this page.

The webinar will run in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. If you have not used Collaborate Ultra before, it may be helpful to consult our webinar FAQs. 

Online meeting with Jane Secker and Chris Morrision for those interested in talking about copyright challenges at the current time and how we can address them. Jane and Chris have published a page full of resources. No registration is required to join this event which will be hosted in Blackboard Ultra. Follow this link to join the session at the appropriate time. A recording to this session will be posted on this page.

The webinar will run in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. If you have not used Collaborate Ultra before, it may be helpful to consult our webinar FAQs. 

Internationalisation has been a key theme in higher education (HE) for decades. Multiple initiatives across the world have contributed to creating offerings of high-quality online education, with collaborations across national borders. Two of the concepts that have proved to be influential are Virtual Mobility (VM) and Open Education (OE). Virtual mobility refers to study activities that students enrolled in HE in one country undertake online in other countries without physically moving. Such activities are certified and mutually acknowledged by participating institutions. Open education covers global initiatives increasing access to free online quality education, without or with alternative forms of certification.

The research presented in this article identifies the learner skills and competences that are supported by Open Virtual Mobility (OpenVM), a new trend in online education that builds upon these two concepts. A group concept mapping study based on the contributions of experts in both VM and OE resulted in defining seven learner skills and competence areas including: intercultural skills and attitudes; networked learning; active self-regulated learner skills; media and digital literacy; autonomy-driven learning, interactive and collaborative learning in an authentic international environment and open-mindedness. The study provided input for further conceptualising of OpenVM as a bridge between VM and OE.