At the Intersection of Open Practice and Inter-University Collaboration: eMundus Project [754] Members : OER15

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Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm

Authors: Terese Bird

Room: Weston Anthony Hopkins Centre

Theme: Open Education across Languages and Cultures

Type: Short Paper

Description

The eMundus Project funded by the European Comission promotes ways “to help establish long-term international partnership, aiming for an open international setting where universities cooperate based on their capacity not only to attract international students but to meaningfully cooperate and share experiences with counterpart universities.”(eMundusProject, 2014) eMundus can be understood as studying, promoting, and enabling collaborations between universities, enabled by open practice – or promoting initiatives at the intersection of open practice and inter-university collaboration. eMundus endeavours to do this by mapping out patterns of open practice collaboration between universities via an online atlas, providing written reports of open practice collaborations by country and region in WikiEducator, sharing examples of good practice and help for interested institutions and individuals, and by enlisting community partners to assist with highlighting best practice and to bring collaboration success stories to their institutions. So far, for example, the project has identified 160 open practice institutionally-collaborative initiatives from 55 countries, in 48 languages including Chamorro, Euskera, Galician, Gallego, and Setswana.

This ‘mini workshop’ gives participants the chance to explore the atlas, wiki, and Exploratorium (outputs so far from the project), and to collaboratively recommend will help to answer the questions:

1) How can universities be encouraged to collaborate around open practice in a political and economic context of institutional competition?

2) What benefits of open practice and collaboration can be celebrated and highlighted to encourage this?

3) What success stories do you know which can be highlighted by eMundus?

Nascimbeni identified three gaps which must be traversed in order to establish open practice institutional collaboration: the understanding gap, the sharing gap, and the mainstreaming gap (Nascimbeni, 2014). As OER15 focuses on Mainstreaming Open Education, eMundus offers insight into patterns of policy and practice to help educators move over the ‘gaps’ toward mainstreaming both open practice and collaboration.

eMundusProject (2014) “Welcome to eMundus,” eMundus Project Website, [online] Available from: http://www.emundus-project.eu/ (Accessed 24 November 2014).

Nascimbeni, F. (2014) “The increased complexity of Higher Education collaboration in times of Open Education,” Campus virtuales, 3(1), pp. 102–108.

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