Moving the OER Policy Registry to the OER World Map

JOIN US AT THE OER POLICY FORUM IN WARSAW!

Creative Commons defines OER policies “as legislation, institutional policies, and/or funder mandates that lead to the creation, increased use, and/or support for improving OER”. OER policy making has been of major concern within the global open education movement, since policies – at their best – can be powerful top-down-instruments which can support the mainstreaming of OER on national, provincial / state and institutional levels.

To support the development and implementation of effective OER policies, Creative Commons provides the Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy Registry, a database of current and proposed open education policies from around the world. The registry allows anybody to easily share, update, and browse open education policies and legislation. It also hosts supporting policy resources such as case studies and guides.

During Open Education Global Conference 2018, Creative Commons and the OER World Map Project agreed to migrate the registry to the OER World Map for two reasons:

1. The OER World Map already lists open education people, projects and services around the world. Adding open policies as a new layer to the OER World Map enables open advocates and policy makers to get a more complete picture of all open education activities in a particular country or region.
2. Within the wider collection strategy of the OER World Map, the OER Policy Registry can act as a rapid alert system by identifying powerful new policies, which are expected to result in projects, programs as well as in services and new open educational practices (see figure 1).

The OER World Map Collection Strategy 2019

After an initial phase of conceptual discussion, the project recently started its practical work with the import of the existing policies from the OER policy registry to the OER World Map. Following an agile approach, we note that this import is just the first iteration, these policies need to be checked and updated, new open education policies need to be added (a short manual describing how to do so), and the OER World Map will need additional features to fully leverage this new open policy layer.

The next step will be a discussion of the project during the Third OER Policy Forum, which will take place in Warsaw 15-16 October 2018. Goals of the workshop will be to:

• identify the needs of open education policy practitioners related to an ideal design of the policy layer on the OER World Map
• form an initial group of dedicated Open Education Policy Experts, which are willing to cooperate on updating and maintaining the policy layer on the OER World Map in the coming months and years.

Concrete Questions we would like to discuss with participants of the OER Policy Forum are:

1. What exactly are open education policies and what is the goal of the policy layer on the OER World Map?
2. What functionality does a dedicated group of open education experts need to update and maintain the policy layer?
3. How can open education policies be described with metadata and clustered?
4. In addition to the policy layer on the OER World Map, should we also build an external Open Education Policy website, which is driven by OER World Map policy data? Or will the policy functionalities in the OER World Map be sufficient?

Further information can be found in our working paper as well as in the OER World Map Github (First Iteration, Second Iteration). Every participant of the OER Policy Forum is invited to join the workshops. If you cannot join us, please feel invited to join the discussion by commenting on the working paper or related github issues, or by contacting us directly under info@oerworldmap.org.