Appendix A: Organizations, Projects, Initiatives
Canada
Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE-RCIÉ): a national organization of professionals committed to excellence in the provision of innovation in education in Canada.
Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan: This charitable organization maintains the Darakht-e Danesh Library, a digital repository of open educational resources (OERs) for teachers, students on more than 3,000 resources in over 100 subjects, for both primary and secondary teachers, in three languages: Dari, Pashto and English, and hopes to expand into additional Afghan minority languages. The library was created to increase access to quality, locally adapted educational resources.
Contact North: Helps underserved Ontarians in 600 small, rural, remote, Indigenous and Francophone communities get jobs by making it possible for them to access education and training without leaving their communities.
Creative Commons Canada: Email, social media: Twitter and first chapter meeting minutes
eCampusOntario: A not-for-profit corporation, is funded by the Government of Ontario to be a centre of excellence in online and technology-enabled learning for all publicly-funded colleges and universities in Ontario.
Flexible Learning for Open Education (FLOE): Led by the Inclusive Design Research Centre and applies Inclusive Design to open learning, FLOE supports learners, educators and curriculum producers in achieving one-size-fits-one learning design for the full diversity of learners, leveraging the variants made possible by Open Education Resources (OER).
GCshare: Developed by the Research, Design and Accessibility team at the Canada School of Public Service in partnership with eCampusOntario, GCshare is a content sharing and discovery platform for open educational resources (OERs) initiated by the Government of Canada with the goal of supporting learning professionals in creating quality learning experiences.
Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative: On September 11, 2015, Manitoba’s Minister of Education and Advanced Learning the Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative with the goal of making higher education more accessible by reducing students costs through the use of openly licensed textbooks in Manitoba.
OER + ScholComm: An IMLS-funded collaboration to research the ideal components of and to develop a corpus of open educational resources (OER) that supports formal and continuing education preparing librarians to work in and advocate for change in the scholarly communication landscape.
Open Government (Canada): Is about making government more accessible to everyone. Participate in conversations, find data and digital records in the open portal, attend conferences, and learn about the Open Government licence (very similar to the Creative Commons licence).
Open/Technology in Education Society and Scholarship Association (OTESSA): Supports and shares new knowledge from both academic and professional research and innovation in practice as it pertains to the application of technology and openness across K12, post-secondary, and other relevant sectors where learning and knowledge sharing are required.
United States
Achieving the Dream (ATD): A non-governmental U.S. network of community colleges looking to transform education and help students through knowledge sharing, innovative solutions and effective practices and policies.
Affordable Learning Georgia: A USG initiative to promote student success by supporting the implementation of affordable alternatives to expensive commercial textbooks, particularly Open Educational Resources (OER) and open textbooks such as OpenStax Textbooks, which are both free and customizable for exactly what a faculty member would like to teach within their courses. We also encourage the use of electronic resources made available through GALILEO.
Apereo: A vibrant and value-driven organization with a noteworthy history celebrating two strong organizations, the Sakai Foundation and Jasig. The incubation process – helps software communities on the path to sustainable innovation – benefits both projects, in terms of structured support in their early stages, and adopters, in terms of clarity around the steps young projects have taken to guarantee Intellectual Property Rights, and build a sustaining community.
Building Open Infrastructure at CUNY: This project presents reflections by CUNY Graduate Center faculty, staff, and students on ongoing work on open educational resources and open pedagogy. These projects have been supported by the Teaching and Learning Center and GC Digital Initiatives
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resource (CCCOER): A growing consortium of community and technical colleges committed to expanding access to education and increasing student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources.
Creative Commons: With a network of staff, board, and affiliates around the world, Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses to make a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work–on conditions of your choice. This is the Creative Commons Style Guide 2019.
DigiTex (Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas): Statewide initiatives and opportunities in OER.
Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3): We position member organizations to realize the promise of high-quality, accessible, and sustainable OER implementations to achieve equity and student success at scale.
Hewlett Foundation, Open Education: Since its support for open educational resources (OER) began in 2002, the foundation’s goal has always been to equalize access to knowledge by making high quality educational materials and opportunities more broadly available.
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME): An independent, education non-profit established in 2002, whose mission is to improve the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector. Based in Silicon Valleys Half Moon Bay, California, ISKME supports innovative teaching and learning practices throughout the globe, and is well-known for its pioneering open education initiatives.
Libraries as Leaders: Librarians as Open Education Leaders
Lumen Learning: A for-profit company that works with over 250 colleges and universities across the U.S. to provide sustainable, effective course materials (OER) that improve learning.
Michelson 20MM (originally Twenty Million Minds Foundation): Originally formed in 2010 to to tackle a broken textbook publishing model controlled by five major textbook publishers, it is now dedicated to supporting and investing in entrepreneurs, technologies, and higher learning initiatives that seek to transform lives.
National Science Digital Library (NSDL): Provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Most resources in the library adhere to principles of OER access, although some resources are restricted to provider site membership, or may have a cost associated with them (indicated in the full record of the resource).
NROC Project: Creates open educational resources (OER) designed to broaden learners’ access to high-quality educational opportunities.
OER Metadata Group: Establishing OER metadata standards for discovery calling all technical services librarians and OER search engine administrators.
Office of Educational Technology (Open Education): A U.S. government department that creates an open education ecosystem that involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.
Open Education Network: Helps higher education institutions and systems in the U.S. advance the use of open textbooks and practices on their campuses and maintains the Open Textbook Library, the premiere resource for peer-reviewed academic textbooks.
Open Oregon: Promotes textbook affordability for Oregon’s community college and university students, and facilitates widespread adoption of open, low-cost, high-quality materials.
Open RN: The Open RN project is funded by a $2.5 million dollar grant from the Department of Education to create 5 OER Nursing Textbooks with 25 associated Virtual Reality scenarios.
Open Source Initiative (OSI): OSI was formed in 1998 as an educational, advocacy, and stewardship organization for open software source code.
Open Textbooks Pilot Project (US Department of Education): The Open Textbooks Pilot program supports projects at institutions of higher education that create new open textbooks or expand their use of open textbooks while maintaining or improving instruction and student learning outcomes.
Open SUNY and Open SUNY Textbooks: Open SUNY (The State University of New York) is an initiative in which programs for 64 SUNY institutions offer a suite of supports and services–including OER–at no additional cost.
Open Textbook Alliance: A network of U.S. college student government leaders who are bringing open textbooks to their campuses.
Open Washington: State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) launched this site in 2014; it is an open educational resources network for Washington State Community and Technical College (WA CTC) faculty.
OpenStax: A nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University that publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed post-secondary textbooks. Also see information about its National Student Internship Program.
Regional Leaders of Open Education Initiative: Launched in fall 2019, the Regional Leadership for Open Education (RLOE) initiative was motivated by CCCOER leaders’ growing need to collaborate across institutional and state boundaries to find solutions for issues impacting OER adoption at diverse, large multi-institution systems. They also made several presentations (with slides) at the OpenEd 2020 Virtual conference.
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Access Resources Coalition): Works to enable open sharing of research and educational materials to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.
Student PIRGs (Affordable Education): The Student Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) works with staff at colleges and universities to ensure students have the skills, opportunities and training they need to create a better, more sustainable future through issues such as affordable education, climate change, public health, democracy, and more.
Northern Hemisphere
Budapest Open Access Initiative: In response to the growing demand to make research free and available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, a diverse coalition has issued new guidelines that could usher in huge advances in the sciences, medicine, and health.
Centrum Cyfrowe: Making the world more inclusive, more cooperative and more open by changing the way people learn, participate in culture, use the internet and exercise their rights as internet users.
The Commonwealth Education Hub: Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy Brief
Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR): An international association that brings together individual repositories and repository networks in order to build capacity, align policies and practices, and act as a global voice for the repository community.
European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN): Shares knowledge and improves understanding amongst professionals in distance and e-learning and to promote policy and practice across the whole of Europe and beyond.
FabSchools: A set of activities embedded in the EU Creative Europe Distributed Design Platform. It’s a research process aimed at identifying, cataloguing, testing, and deploying educational distributed design proposals of lessons and products.
Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN): A network of over 900 government, universities, foundations, and private organizations around the world with the aim of raising awareness of the call for making agricultural and nutrition data open. It supports the proactive sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable to deal with the urgent challenge of ensuring world food security.
Global Open Initiative (GOI): Located in Accra, Ghana, GOI is a not-for-profit organization made up of a dedicated group of open advocates who are striving to solve social problems that confront our communities such as challenges in public services delivery, transparency and democratic control, and availability of educational resources.
Karisma: Promotes human rights in the digital world, and is the affiliated entity that supports the Colombian chapter of Creative Commons.
Knowledge 4 All Foundation: A distributed institute based in London (UK), with two main streams of activities, on one side pioneering Machine Learning methods of pattern analysis, statistical modeling, and computational learning and on the other transform these into technologies for large scale applications in Open Education.
Knowledge Exchange: A European partnership to improve services for higher education and research. Current focus areas are Open Scholarship – promoting openness and reuse of data on a European level; and Open Access – supporting the growth of OA and ensure it is sustainable in the long term.
Knowledge Unlatched (Berlin): Makes scholarly content freely available to everyone and contributes to the further development of the Open Access (OA) infrastructure. Our online marketplace provides libraries and institutions worldwide with a central place to support OA collections and models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives. With their support we transition monographs and journals in a wide variety of disciplines from paywalled to Open Access content.
National Forum, Open Education: In light of the growing development of open education policies and practices across Europe and internationally, as well as the increasing urgency of supporting Irish higher education staff and students in an increasingly networked society, the National Forum Strategy 2019-21 includes a specific focus on supporting open education principles, practices and policies in Irish higher education. The National Forum recognises that this requires both support for individual open practice as well as a commitment to openness at programme, institutional and national levels.
OER Hub: Researching open education.
Open Education Passport (OEPASS): Improving the portability and recognition of open learning.
Open Knowledge Foundation: A global, not-for-profit organization campaigning and working on technology, training, policy, and research in open knowledge and open data.
Open.Ed: From the University of Edinburgh, Open.Ed supports the University’s vision, purpose and values with OER including a repository.
OpenMed: Raises awareness and facilitated the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) in the South-Mediterranean countries, with a particular focus on higher education in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Palestine.
Open Scotland: Open Scotland is a voluntary cross sector initiative that aims to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education. Open Scotland is supported by the University of Edinburgh and the ALT Scotland SIG.
OPERAS (Open Access in the European Research Area through Scholarly Communication): Coordinate and pool university-led scholarly communication activities in Europe in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), in view of enabling Open Science as the standard practice.
Polish Coalition for Open Education: An institutional partner of Creative Commons Poland, founding member of the Communia Association, founding member of the Polish Coalition for Open Education and member of the Copyright for Creativity coalition.
ReOPEN (Recognition of Valid and Open Learning): Aims to create instruments to develop validated OOL for recognition of prior and non-formal learning.
SURF (Dutch) Open Educational Resources Roadmaps: Making learning materials accessible to everyone. That is our ambition. SURF wants to join forces with educational institutions to stimulate the sharing and reuse of OER. Be inspired by instructors who experiment with the use of OER and share their experiences.
Year of Open: A global focus on open processes, systems, and tools, created through collaborative approaches, that enhance our education, businesses, governments, and organizations.
Southern Hemisphere
African Virtual University (AVU): A Pan African Intergovernmental Organization established by charter with the mandate of significantly increasing access to quality higher education and training through the innovative use of information communication technologies.
Australian Open Textbook Project: This project builds on American research showing that equity students benefit most from free textbooks similar to the benefits of scholarships/financial aid – by lifting grades and course progress rates. This study replicates the UK national scoping study with equity-focussed additions, using a social justice frame-work to test the potential within the Australian context in terms of redistributive (economic), recognitive and representational justice.
New Zealand: Government departments using Creative Commons.
OER Africa: An initiative of Saide, established in 2008 with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, to collaborate with higher education institutions in Africa in the development and use of Open Educational Resources (OER), to enhance teaching and learning.
Open Saide: Making available Saide’s Open Educational Resources, on-line professional development open courses, and software tools for the education market free to use, adapt, repurpose and share.
ROER4D (Research on Open Education Resources for Development): Investigates ways and under what circumstances the adoption of open educational resources (OER) ccan address the increasing demand for accessible, relevant, high-quality and affordable education in the Global South.
Global
Commonwealth of Learning (COL): As one of its initiatives, COL promotes the open schooling model across the Commonwealth.
FOSTER: FOSTER Plus (Fostering the practical implementation of Open Science in Horizon 2020 and beyond) is a 2-year, EU-funded project, carried out by 11 partners across 6 countries. The primary aim is to contribute to a real and lasting shift in the behaviour of European researchers to ensure that Open Science (OS) becomes the norm.
GO-GN: The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) is a network of PhD candidates around the world whose research projects include a focus on open education (i.e. OER, OEP, MOOC). These doctoral researchers are at the core of the network; around them, over two hundred experts, supervisors, mentors and interested parties connect to form a community of practice.
Initiative for Open Citations: A collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data.
International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE): Leading global membership organization for online, open and flexible education and draws its membership from institutions, educational authorities, commercial actors, and individuals.
International Development Research Centre (IDRC | CRDI): Supports research in developing countries to create real and lasting change. This knowledge can be used as a tool for addressing pressing global challenges. Open access policy.
OER & Textbook Affordability Initiatives: This document was originally assembled as background and reference materials for a University Academic Senate Task Force on Open Educational Resources and Affordable Course Materials, at Grand Valley State University (Allendale, Michigan).
OERu: Connects learners around the world with defined pathways to education, created by recognised educators and assessed by renowned global institutions. The learning is free and credentialing is very affordable.
On the Commons: A commons movement strategy center founded in 2001. Through our efforts, we help build and bring visibility to the commons movement; initiate and catalyze commons work; develop and encourage commons leadership. We believe it is possible to foster a commons-based society, which refers to a shift away from our market-based system, through new, collaborative ways of working.
OneHE: Equity Unbound has teamed up with OneHE to develop some open educational resources for online community-building.
Open Education for a Better World: The programme enrolls mentees from all over the world to, under a guidance of internationally recognized mentors, develop and implement OERs based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The process is person focused, led by the mentee and supported by the mentor through dialogue. Mentee owns the process and takes the main responsibilitiy for defining his/her needs for gaining from the mentoring relationship what is intended.
Open Education Global (previously Open Education Consortium): A non-profit, global, members-based network of open education institutions and organizations. OE Global represents its members and provides advocacy and leadership around advancement of open education globally.
- OE Global: Strategic Plan 2021-2030
- OEG Job Opportunity
Open Education Group: An interdisciplinary research group that conducts research on the impact of OER adoption on a range of educational outcomes and designs and shares methodological and conceptual frameworks for studying the impact of OER adoption.
Open Education Working Group (from Open Knowledge International): Brings people together to promote Open Educational Practices and Open Educational Resources, as well as Open Policies, Open Science and Open Data in education to initiate global cross-sector and cross-domain activity that encompasses the various facets of open education.
Open Knowledge International: A global non-profit organisation focused on realising open data’s value to society by helping civil society groups access and use data to take action on social problems. There is a Network of countries participating.
Open Logic Project: A collection of teaching materials on mathematical logic aimed at a non-mathematical audience, intended for use in advanced logic courses as taught in many philosophy departments. It is open-source: you can download the LaTeX code. It is open: you’re free to change it whichever way you like, and share your changes. It is collaborative: a team of people is working on it, using the GitHub platform, and we welcome contributions and feedback.
The Open Organization: A community-driven project leading a global conversation about the ways open principles change how people work, manage, and lead. Our community members generate knowledge and share strategies for building organizational cultures on principles like transparency, adaptability, collaboration, inclusivity, and community.
Team Open: Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Team Open is a project to collect and share stories of the power of Creative Commons licenses.
Year of Open: A global focus on open processes, systems, and tools, created through collaborative approaches, that enhance our education, businesses, governments, and organizations.
