Towards a Nordic Alliance for Open Education – a Position Paper

The paper outlines the current situation of Open Education / Open Educational Resources in the Nordic country. We show examples and practices - based on expert workshops, we discuss barriers and necessary actions to overcome those. The paper is meant to be dynamic and will be improved and further developed - be part of the process at http://www.nordlet.org Open Educational Resources are discussed widely on a global, European and even Nordic level. UNESCO coined the term Open Educational Resources (OER) some 10 years ago and published in June 2012 a global agenda for OER, the Paris Declaration (adopted by OER World Congress). The Declaration shows the importance of Open Educational Resources and givesrecommendations to governments and institutions around the globe. The European Union has started a large-scale initiative on “Opening Up Education" (http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/documents/consult/open_en.pdf). Both the Nordic Council and the Nordic University Co-operation (NUS) will discuss OER in 2013. These developments inspired a Nordic initiative on promoting and utilizing Open Education in the Nordic countries with a focus on creating a strong base for OER and Open Educational Practices (OEP) in the region, also with a global outreach in mind. The Nordic countries have the potential to become a forerunner in OEP and the use of OER activities in Europe: 1 The Nordic countries share many values related to education and technology development; the political and governmental institutions are quite similar and there is a tradition for exchange f knowledge and solutions between the countries. Focusing on arelatively homogeneous region llows the newly-formed group to come up with specific recommendations that can reach the ears of policy makers, be implemented in policies and practice, and be used in new project proposals. 2 Open Educational Resources could potentially be a change agent in schools as well as in universities and vocational education. Having OER as scope allows the group to use one strong prism to reflect the crossroads the educational systems have to navigate in the target countries. In this document, we will briefly give an introduction to OER and reflect on the main recommendations as well as propose implementation actions for governments and institutions.The elearningeuropa.info portal is an initiative of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education and Culture