Every year since 2015, SRCE has been continuously involved in the celebration of Open Education Week. This year, an online discussion entitled "Let's talk openly: How to encourage open educational practices in higher education?"
An online discussion was held on Wednesday, March 3, 2021, via the webinar system. Ten participants, mostly university teachers, from various parts of Croatia took part in the discussion.
After reviewing important concepts related to open education, participants were briefly introduced to SRCE's activities in the field of open education, and especially related to the publication of educational materials under a Creative Commons license. In the discussion that followed, teachers exchanged their experiences regarding development and use of open educational content in teaching at higher education institutions. Individual teachers shared their experiences about involving students in the process of creating educational materials and encouraging collaboration among students by sharing personal notes. In addition to the benefits that open content brings them, teachers have also recognized a number of challenges such as the availability of quality educational content in the Croatian language. And while teachers generally share educational content among students and colleagues, there are a number of challenges related to their public disclosure such as the issue of copyright and the institution’s commitment to openness.
When asked about the type of educational materials they would like to publish as open educational content, teachers mostly expressed their readiness to share presentations, recorded lectures, manuals and interactive educational facilities such as simulations.
Once again we would like to thank all the teachers who participated in the discussion and we look forward to new meetings in the future.
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Open Education Week is an international initiative that is celebrated globally in March each year with the aim of raising awareness of openness and promoting the positive impact of open education on learning and teaching, and this year it is celebrated from 1 to 5 March. For many years, SRCE has been encouraging the principles of open access, and in this way wants to further raise awareness of the importance of open education with an emphasis on the use, preparation and adaptation of educational materials to the user community for which the materials are intended.
