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Speakers included Tora Aasland, President of the Norwegian National Commission for UNESCO and former Minister of Research and Higher Education in Norway, who underlined the importance of OER worldwide and nationally. Speaking from UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Abel Caine, Programme Specialist for Open Educational Resources highlighted recent initiatives, especially the 2012 UNESCO OER Paris declaration calling on member governments to make all educational materials produced with public funds freely available. 

 

Sylvi Vigmo, Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning at Sweden's University of Gothenburg presented the initial findings of an in-depth investigation of OER in 17 less used European languages, as part of the LangOER network. She noted challenges in areas ranging from the need to respect the contextual and cultural implications of language to the need for incentives to be created at the policy level.

 

Other speakers included Mansoor Al Anwar, Chancellor of Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University and Wayne Mackintosh, UNESCO, COL and ICDE Chair in OER and The Open Education Resource Foundation, speaking via video link from the United Arab Emirates and New Zealand.

 

Members of the ICDE Executive Committee, in Oslo for their annual face-to-face meeting in ICDE's host country, Norway, contributed, as did a host of other OER experts, stakeholders and policy makers.

 

Approximately 30 partcipants were in Oslo, and 20 online for the workshop. It was chaired by Tian Belawati, Rector of The Indonesian Open University together with ICDE Secretary General, Gard Titlestad.

 

The workshop was designed to provide input to a working policy paper for the LangOER project on OER and challenges and opportunities for less used languages in a global, European, Nordic and national perspective.

 

 

 

Presentations and the recording of the workshop