Tore Hoel

Open Educational Resources are discussed widely on a global, European and even Nordic level. UNESCO coined the term Open Educational Resources (OER) some 10 years ago and
published in June 2012 a global agenda for OER, the Paris Declaration (adopted by OER World Congress). The Declaration shows the importance of Open Educational Resources and gives recommendations to governments and institutions around the globe. The European Union has
started a large-scale initiative on “Opening Up Education

”. Both the Nordic Council and the Nordic University Co-operation (NUS) will discuss OER in 2013. These developments inspired a Nordic initiative on promoting and utilizing Open Education in the Nordic countries with a focus on creating a strong base for OER and Open Educational
Practices (OEP) in the region, also with a global outreach in mind. The Nordic countries have
the potential to become a forerunner in OEP and the use of OER activities in Europe:
The Nordic countries share many values related to education and technology development; the political and governmental institutions are quite similar and there is a
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/documents/consult/open_en.pdf
tradition for exchange of knowledge and solutions between the countries. Focusing on a
relatively homogeneous region allows the newly-formed group to come up with specific
recommendations that can reach the ears of policy makers, be implemented in policies
and practice, and be used in new project proposals.
2  Open Educational Resources could potentially be a change agent in schools as well as
in universities and vocational education. Having OER as scope allows the group to use
one strong prism to reflect the crossroads the educational systems have to navigate in
the target countries.
In this document, we will briefly give an introduction to OER and reflect on the main
recommendations as well as propose implementation actions for governments and institutions.
This document is a living document - the current status reflects the discourse in the Nordic OER
Alliance in January 2013. As discussions and collaborations progress the document will be
continuously revised and improved.

This paper brings together two perspectives on current developments in information and communications technology (ICT) utilized for the purposes of learning, education, and training (LET). One perspective is concerned with governance and legitimacy issues regarding the process and relevance of standards development; the other, is concerned with the role of discerning relevant questions in LET and the potential scope for innovation that might develop tools to support such discernment. Discussion of information systems architecture is introduced as a means to set the context and provide a framework for bringing together an overall narrative and coherence to these two perspectives. Questions initiated by ‘why’ are of particular interest because they typically demand an explanation in natural language to satisfy the questioner. By focusing on ‘why’ as a key ‘primitive’ of enquiry the authors present an approach that might inform improved processes of ICT for LET (a.k.a ITLET) standardiz...

Due to the increasing professional mobility of their parents, pupils often find themselves in new and unfamiliar learning scenarios in foreign contexts and countries. Besides having to leave their familiar environments, these pupils additionally may face language barriers, different curricula, and have to cope with foreign cultures. Printed textbooks, which are the most commonly used educational resources in schools, provide little support for these pupils to manage the new challenges. Teachers are the professionals designated to provide the necessary support. However, they often may not fully appreciate the pupils’ individual challenges. Possible solutions could be the provision of alternative learning contents in the pupils’ native languages and an international open exchange of knowledge and experiences amongst schoolteachers. These issues are addressed by the Open Discovery Space platform. In order to empower this platform to provide the best possible support to teachers, we exp...

ABSTRACT This paper presents a framework for improving the legitimacy of learning technology standards by focussing on a better process and product. It is suggested that there is a need for a change in the standardisation paradigm, moving from monolithic to more modular standards.

This paper describes the first experiences in development and usage of an environment to support a community in collaborative modeling efforts in the area of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). With first priority, the domain of interest, the sub-...

Abstract: Emergent technologies, such as “weblogs”, are being applied by organisations in their attempts to harness the tacit knowledge of workers and thereby develop “organisational intelligence” as part of a broad knowledge management and communication strategy. This ...

Open Discovery Space (ODS) is a school-related European Project with the aim to setting up a freely accessible international platform for the centralized access to many OER repositories and fostering the exchange of Open Educational Practices through the establishment of community platforms on lo-cal, regional, national and supra-national level. In order to reach the highest possible level of ac-ceptance in the community, provide the best possible support, and truly establishing a worldwide hub for Open Educational Resources, we investigated on barriers against the use, production, and reuse of Open Educational Resources, which are to be addressed by the Open Discovery Space platform. For that purpose, we conducted a workshop at the EDEN 2013 conference. After an introduction of the ODS project, we will present the barriers that our workshop participants reported of, their recommen-dations for the solutions to overcome those barriers and the mechanisms which we are going to im-plement in the ODS platform in order to provide the best possible support to the community.

Abstract—This outline of the workshop and the accompanying briefing document (Foresight of Technology Enhanced Learning, by Hoel and Hollins) address how Stakeholders within the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) community view their own future scope to use advanced learning technologies. The briefing document discusses arguably problematic methodologies and processes used within TEL to predict the future.