Call for action on open education from NMC and the Open University of Catalonia

A communiqué has just been released about the outcome of the Open Ed Tech conference held jointly by NMC and UOC in Barcelona October 19-20, 2009.

Summary

‘Summit attendees generated fifty action items necessary to realize the goal of creating an institution truly responsive to the needs of students today and into the foreseeable future, and then ranked them. Those which ranked highest are captured here, and framed as a Call to Action – five major tasks that are perceived as critical to achieving open education:

• We must encourage the reuse and remixing of rich media
• We must embrace the full promise of mobile devices as learning platforms
• We must award credentials based on learning outcomes
• We must enable a culture of sharing
• We must take care that open resources include the context that will enable its use and understanding.

Higher education must begin to recognize the utility and value of informal avenues of learning, self-directed learning, and the new forms of mentorship made possible via the network and social media. Thoughtful experimentation must be encouraged at all levels, including the formation of whole new forms of institutions.’