The “Open Educational Quality Initiative” is an international network to promote innovation and improved quality in education and training through the use of open educational resources. OPAL has been established through international organisations including UNESCO, ICDE and EFQUEL in order to establish a forum which works to build greater trust in using and promoting open educational resources. The project is part funded by the European Commission Education and Training Lifelong Learning Programme.

The Open Educational Quality Initiative focuses on provision of innovative open educational practices and promotes quality, innovation and transparency in higher and adult education.

The OPAL Initiative is a partnership between seven organizations including ICDE, UNESCO, European Foundation for Quality, the Open University UK, Aalto University and the Catholic University Portugal. It is led by the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany and partly funded by the European Commission.

The OPAL Initiative moves beyond the issue of access to open educational resources (OER), and focuses on innovation and quality through open educational practices (OEP). Existing approaches for fostering the use of OER have made achievements by focusing on building access to resources (MERLOT, MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford iTunes,OpenLearn, Rice University, the UNESCO Open Training Platform, the UNESCO OER wiki) and licence models (Creative Commons). However, concerns over quality, the absence of trust on the part of learners and educators, and a lacking sense of ownership of the materials hinder wider acceptance of OER. OPAL seeks to build trust by establishing an environment for quality and Innovation through OEP.

OPAL works to build a multi-stakeholder environment in order to root quality and innovation in a broad consensus, combine activities and provide an interface for international initiatives which promote OEP on a sustainable level. The project addresses both higher education and adult education, bringing stakeholders from each sector’s governance community together, and promotes OEP in both sectors so that learners may benefit from continuity when moving between university and adult education.

Beyond Europe: The nature of the funding of the project means that the focus lies within the European context, though the involvement of ICDE and UNESCO underlines the project’s strategy of connecting European organisations to international debate, and making the EU a lighthouse region for OEP in the world.

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Allison Miller 04-03-2011, 02:24

Do you have an e-newsletter subscription list or similar?

Regards, Allison Miller

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