Presentation to be given at OKFestival14 - open development session

1. Open Education and Open
Development – working together
Friday 18th July, OKFestival, Berlin
Marieke Guy
PRESENTED BY

2. LinkedUp Project
Linking data for Education
• EU Project from Nov 2012 - Nov 2014
• FP7 Support Action which “pushes forward the
exploitation and adoption of public, open data
available on the Web, in particular by
educational organisations and institutions”
Activities:
• LinkedUp Challenge: Veni, Vidi, Vici
• Evaluation Framework for Open Web Data
• Open Web Data Success Stories
• Collation of datasets
• Community building
http://linkedup-project.eu/

3. Open
Education
Working
Group
…established to bring together
people and groups interested in
open education. Its goal is to
initiate global cross-sector and
cross-domain activity that
encompasses the various facets
of open education.

4. http://education.okfn.org

5. Open Education Pie
• Policy
• OER
• Accreditation and
badges
• Licensing
• Tools
• Data
• Learning and
teaching practices
• …

6. Advisory Board

7. Open Education Around the World
Series of posts
• Greenland
• Iceland
• United Kingdom
• Scotland
• Tanzania
• India
• South Africa
• Rwanda
• Holland …

8. General Activities
Areas of interest and ideas
● Community building – making contact
● Open Education timeline
● OKFestival, July, Berlin – Open Education Smörgåsbord session
● Support for LMRI initiatives, standards, platform for Open
Standards work
● OER and small languages and cultures (multilingualism)
● Open Education language – making it appropriate for all
● Support for member activities e.g. Open Data Ireland booksprint
● Connections with local groups: Belgium, Finland, Brazil

9. Activities: Handbook
The Open Education Handbook
• A collaboratively written living web document targeting
educational practitioners and the education community at
large
• Coverage is broad and determined by authors
• Kick-started at a series of booksprints and events
• Available online for editing in Booktype, open source book
editing software
• Translated in to Portuguese, set on Slidewiki
• Future plans: glossary, universal style, definitions, synergies
between areas, flow, fact checking, more questions, front end

10. Booksprints

11. Plans for the Future
Growing organically…
• Listening to the community and following up in directions
where they feel there is a gap and we can help
• Linking with other organisations and initiatives
• Creating a members group
• Making myself redundant!!
You can:
• Join our mailing list: http://education.okfn.org/mailing-list/
• Email me: marieke.guy@okfn.org

12. The Internet Audience
Some context…
By end 2014, the number of Internet users globally will have
reached almost 3 billion. Two-thirds of the world’s Internet
users are from the developing world. This corresponds to an
Internet-user penetration of 40 per cent globally, 78 per cent in
developed countries and 32 per cent in developing countries.
More than 90 per cent of the people who are not yet using the
Internet are from the developing world.
ITU (International Telecommunication Union) - the United Nations specialized
agency for information and communication technologies, May 2014

14. Making it Matter Workshop
So what does it have to do with us?
● “Supporting education in the developing world through open
and linked data”
● Workshop held in London on 16th May
● Approximately 30 people: teachers, educators, members of
the open development movement, open data and linked data
communities, developers, technologists
● Talks, break out sessions
● Entire day streamed and shared afterwards
● Concrete outputs
http://linkedup-project.eu/making-it-matter-workshop/

15. Breakouts
• What real world problems are
there related to education in the
developing world that could
potentially be solved by data
and technology solutions?
• What data is out there and what
data could be released to aid
education in the developing
world
• Next Steps – what are we going
to do?

16. Real world Problems
Related to education could be solved by data/technology
• Resources and data tend to be in specific languages
• Quality of OERs and their discoverability.
• Poor infrastructure means that education can rarely be carried out solely online.
• Currently resources and technology are often built by the developed world for
others to use. We need to flip this approach and support through training.
• Teachers are under-qualified and not sufficiently trained.
• Decisions makers are not well informed of the potential of open education/data.
• Key areas that need more support: adult literacy, special needs, non-science
subjects, vocational training. Lack of resources or skill sharing in these areas.
• Better ways for us to work with commercial suppliers and fresh approaches to
business models.
• Missing some very basic data sets, such as the location of schools, infrastructure
details e.g. electricity availability, text book use etc.
• There is a need to enhance local open data ecosystems.

17. Available Data
And what data could be released
• Student data: attendance, grades, skills, exams, homework… Course
data: employability related to courses, curriculum, syllabus, VLE data,
number of textbooks, skills, digital literacy…
• Institution data: success/failure rates, results, infrastructure, power
consumption, location, student enrolment, textbook budget, teacher
contracts, drop out rates, total cost of ownership, sponsorship, cost per
pupil, graduation rates, male vs female, years in education, ratio of
students to teaching staff…
• Learning analytics: Laptop data (possibly from the OLPC programme),
time on tasks, OER data, use of different programmes/apps, web site
data…
• Policy/Government data: equity, budgets, spending, UNESCO literacy
data, deprivation and marginalisation in education, participation…

18. Next steps
Quick wins and bigger asks…
Quick wins
• Ideas from the day will feed in to the Vici Focused track
• Contribute to the Open Education Handbook, join group
Bigger Asks
• Learn from others: Looking at what is already taking place in other countries (such
as Brazil) who are ahead of the game.
• Teach others: Share what we know so that the developing world can learn new
skills and use them to find their own path.
• Find solutions: To the problems that we’ve identified, this will take time, money
and a driven community.
• Show impact: Find ways to measure the impact of what we are doing: are we
making a difference? What stories can we share?
• Run a data census for education data

19. http://linkedup-challenge.org/vici-focused-tracks/
Vici
Submission
deadline 5
September

20. Paper provisory title: My Transparent School – A
comparative analysis of open government data in basic
education between Brazil and England
http://bit.ly/oewg-data-comOtavio Ritter

21. Open Development
Connecting with your working group
• Similar goals: Ensuring access to education is a key challenge
in developing countries
• Interest in data: Data has a role to play in relation to student
requirements, transparent finances, infrastructure,
government decisions, policy …etc.
• Open content: Open education has experience of open
content and resources
• …