In 2021, the Open Education Awards for Excellence celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Every year for ten years, Open Education Global has recognized the brilliance within the Open Education sector through its Open Education Awards for Excellence. The winners of these awards represent works that encapsulate the aspirations of the movement, further inspire outstanding achievements, and add immeasurably to the shared wealth of the open education community.
To celebrate this milestone, the OEG will host an online event on December 7th. The occasion will be a special look back at the outstanding achievements of the open education community in the last decade.
As a past winner of two special awards, OEG invited Dr. Okada – representing Rumpus – to be part of the celebration.
Project/Initiative: ENGAGE – equipping the next generation for active engagement with science supported by fun in learning
Link: http://www.engagingscience.eu/en
Award: Creative Innovation Award
Year: 2017
Project/Initiative: VR classroom – Open APP using Virtual Reality with fun in learning
Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SangarZucchi.VRClassroom
Award: Open App Award
Year: 2019
These awards were very important for the network led by Dr Okada in Brazil, UK and other European countries to support research-based practices and evidence-based policy on open education enhanced by Responsible Research and Innovation. The network has just started another large European-funded project – CONNECT – inclusive open schooling with engaging and future-oriented sciences with a large number of teachers and students in seven countries. Participants of CONNECT phase 1 were more than 100 teachers and 1500 students from the UK, Brazil, Spain Greece, and Romania.
CONNECT team has developed a topical open schooling resource CARBON NEUTRAL launched during COP26 in the UK. The aim of this OER is to help teachers to guide students to voice their views and develop competencies with scientific literacy.
The OER Carbon neutral produced by CONNECT consortium team was designed to promote phenomena-based learning (PhenoBL) first popularised by Finland’s initiative of revolutionising their curriculum in 2016. This buzzword is back again, but this time it is connected to the Next Generation Science Standards.
“PhenoBL is a method of understanding a phenomenon—an observable event—using various methods and perspectives, which may often overlap. PhenoBL takes a broad, multi-faceted look at events and occurrences happening in the real world, such as climate change, migration, or even the European Union. Looking at these subjects from a number of different angles helps the students to truly understand the workings of natural and societal events.” (Twig Education, 2021)
CONNECT team led by Dr. Okada has also launched the platform built by the AI enterprise EXUS to engage teachers and scientists to work together for empowering students.
https://www.connect-science.net/about-the-project/
Through this platform, teachers can download open schooling resources produced by 10 partners in five languages.
Inspired by OE Global, open schooling educators, learners, researchers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers are now connected in CONNECT for open sustainable education of this decade 2030.
“Open education goes beyond open access of knowledge, it also includes open approaches to cocreate knowledge responsibly. Open learners and Open educators are Open Researchers Innovators at heart.” (Okada, 2019)