Can we map Open Education Week?

During a small research project starting during Open Education Week, we will try to look for ways to map Open Education Week, e.g. to put the activities of Open Education Week on the OER World Map.

Our interest in mapping Open Education Week data is twofold: on the one hand we made progress defining our data model by taking real world examples and trying to model them on the OER World Map. Initially we used OER stories for doing this on a micro level, targeting individual actors and activities. Just recently we produced the OER Atlas, giving us the experience of collecting data of a complete country. Collecting Open Education Week data will provide us with another interesting example of collecting real world data on a macro level.

On the other hand we assume that regular events (like conferences or Open Education Week) are good opportunities for regular updates of the OER World Map database. We already synchronised the data collection for the OER Atlas with the OERde 16 Festival and we guess that getting the data of the major global OER events would provide us with a solid set of the most important OER activities, even if smaller projects might be missed. Ideally, the data collection would happen automatically, so that the data being submitted for a conference or another event is automatically transmitted to the World Map. In order to analyse this idea more in detail, we will first take a closer look at the proposals submitted to Open Education Week.

We expect this activity to provide at least two different types of insights:

1. We expect to learn, if it is possible to model the submitted data with our data model. If we find things which we currently cannot map we might extend or change our model.
2. Posing the question “What should be put on the map?” also offers a good opportunity for Open Education Week and the Open Education movement in general to define and understand the value of mapping. Open Education remains an ill defined topic and trying to collect information about it in a structured way will provide deeper insight in the organization of OER ecosystems.

So what will we do in detail, and how can you participate? We started by putting all Open Education Week submissions (without the many events) in a Google Doc open to everyone. We also started reflecting on each entry and members of the OER community are sincerely invited to join this process of reflection by adding comments, especially to entries which are marked as “unclear”. Later on (probably within the next two weeks) we will summarize the results in another blog post and start mapping those events where data is available. In the long run, we will also consider improving identified shortcomings by extending the functionality of the platform.