What competences should open educators have?

On the 2nd of March, in occasion of the Open Education Week, the OpenGame project was presented during the “OER and Open Pedagogies” Webinar organized by EDEN. The presentation focussed on the Open Education teachers competences framework, and raised a lot of interest and questions.

The majority of the participants agreed on the fact that, despite the high interest raised by Open Education in the last years, especially since the launch of the first MOOCs, and despite the consistent efforts of researchers to collect and analyze Open Educational Practices, it is not clear what is the competencies set that an educator should posses in order to work in the open.

Apart from mapping the past efforts done to identify these competences, the OpenGame team has worked to identify this set of competencies starting from the grassroots open practices that educators are implementing, asking the simple question: “which competencies do I have to master in order to replicate such a practice?”. We have identified more than 80 practices and selected 24 for a deeper analysis, and out of these real life cases we have extracted 8 key competences: 4 in the field of OER and 4 in the field of open teaching practices, meaning “teaching with OER” and beyond.

The OpenGame Competencies Framework will be published through a Handbook, that will include also the practices that have inspired it, in June 2020.

The OpenGame project is funded by the European Commission Programme Erasmus +, managed by the Spanish National Authority SEPIE, and coordinated by Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (UNIR).