The IEEE Education Society and Open Education Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialog, knowledge sharing, and capacity building. One of the fundamental concepts of OER’s is “the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge.” Reuse of educational resources by both individuals and organizations could have a significant creative and economic benefit for the educational environment.

“Ljubljana OER Action Plan 2017”, [1] the outcome document of the 2nd World OER Congress, identifies as one of the actions that address the OER challenges Building the capacity of users to find, re-use, create and share OER. This action includes supporting models of good practice with a focus on cost-effectiveness, sustainability, exploration of new tools and technologies for the creation and sharing of OER.

Some institutions have developed guides to develop open educational practices. The Education Society has, for several years, partnered with MERLOT to promote initiatives and practices related to online open education. Through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), the Education Society along with the Computer Society, have previously endorsed and sponsored the MERLOT Information Technology and Computer Science teaching and learning communities. [2]

More recently, via a renewal of the MOU and as announced in the Newsletter of May 2020, the IEEE Education Society launched, in collaboration with MERLOT, the Education Society Teaching Resource Center (ETRC), a Web-based resource to facilitate the discovery of relevant and high-quality teaching resources for higher education instructors of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and information systems. The site is primarily designed for instructors who, because of the pandemic, are seeking guidance on moving their teaching online. [3]

Now, the IEEE Education Society is announcing its endorsement and support of COMPSAC 2021’s first Annual Student OER Contest sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society’s signature, Computers, Software, and Applications Conference. This contest is open to undergraduate students, working alone or in teams of up to 4, who have developed Web-based materials that can be used by instructors or students in university-level Computer Science or Information Technology curricula. Examples of submissions (OERs) that might qualify include websites, animations, videos, presentations, etc. that may have been developed for a class project, and that could be reused for teaching and/or learning.

To enter the contest, teams must upload the material metadata to the MERLOT digital repository and submit an application to COMPSAC. For more information see [4]

MOOCs are another basic element in the digital transformation of education. They have acted as a catalyst for different initiatives that promote the use of OER’s. In addition to sponsoring the LWMOOCS Conference, the leading international conference about Learning with Massive Open Online Courses, the IEEE Education Society continues with its MOOCs series. In response to the successful second edition of the OER Foundations MOOC, registration is open for the MOOC Educational Robotics for All: Gender, Diversity, and Inclusion in STEAM.

This course [5] focuses on the presentation of a combination of teaching methodologies, educational robotics tools, and a student learning management methodology. All of this is focused on strengthening the presence of women in engineering.

The teaching team integrates national and international experts, in the field of Open Education and educational activities for the promotion of women and young people in engineering and STEM. It includes experts from UNED, University of Northumbria (United Kingdom), University of La Laguna, University of Porto, Federal University (Brazil), Technical University of Madrid, University of Vigo, and University Miguel Hernández.

[1] https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/ljubljana_oer_action_plan_2017.pdf
[2] https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewSite.htm?id=9160750&pageid=9181590
[3] https://www.merlot.org/merlot/InformationTechnology.htm
[4] https://ieeecompsac.computer.org/2021/oer-contest/
[5] https://iedra.uned.es/courses/course-v1:UNED+STEM_EngiFound_001+2019/about

For more information, please contact: Edmundo Tovar at [email protected]

Edmundo Tovar
IEEE Education Society President-Elect