The Ljubjlana Action Plan highlights the need to identify and share models of good practice, which have proven to be sustainable ways to organize the production, adoption, sharing and use of Open Educational Resources. We believe that learning from experiences made in other countries will be key for a fast and effective global mainstreaming of OER and that the OER World Map is the ideal tool to support this collaborative learning process.
While the OER World Map still does not include all global initiatives, it already provides so much information, that it is hard to oversee quickly. This is especially true, since the platform did not provide mechanisms to rate the included information until now. To overcome this deficiency we implemented likes and lighthouses, which will allow the global OER community to identify exemplary initiatives easily.
While the like functionality is well known from many platforms, the lighthouse function even goes beyond it by providing a way to mark especially good practice examples, which provide orientation and should be imitated as a whole or partially by other initiatives. Setting a lighthouse is easy. After you logged in, you have to find the initiative, you consider to be a lighthouse. If it is not available yet, please add it to the map or tell us to do so. On the profile page you simply have to click on the lighthouse symbol and explain in the comment field what the community can learn from this example.
Finding lighthouses is equally easy, simply click on the orange lighthouse bottom and you will receive a result list, which is ordered according to the number of received lighthouses.
The lighthouse function can be refined in many ways in the future. One way will be to combine it with our filter section, so that you can easily find e.g. good practices for services in the field of primary education. Also it might be interesting to choose a group of experts you trust in and see only the lighthouses set by this group. Right now it is important that you share your experiences and help to identify the lighthouses, which will provide orientation for navigating our joint journey towards openness.
Picture: Nubble Milky Way by Eric Moreno, CC BY 2.0
OER World Map Blog 
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