News Story

KMi at the Open Education Global conference

Alexander Mikroyannidis, Tuesday 14 Mar 2017

The Open Education Global conference took place last week in the beautiful city of Cape Town. KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis, who presented a paper on the European Data Science Academy (EDSA) project and delivered a workshop related to the SlideWiki project.

Alexander’s paper on the EDSA project describes the project’s approach in using open courseware in order to bridge the Data Science skills gap across Europe. The European Data Science Academy is looking to bridge the data science skills gap by developing multimodal open courseware tailored to the real needs of data practitioners. The EDSA courseware is implemented as a combination of living learning materials and activities (eBook, online courses, webinars, face-to-face training), produced via a rigorous process and validated by the data science community through continuous feedback.

Alexander’s workshop on the SlideWiki project is part of the project’s initiative in developing a collaborative open courseware authoring platform and collecting feedback from the Open Education community. This hands-on workshop offered the opportunity to participants to get acquainted with the redesigned SlideWiki platform and its functionalities for collaborative authoring of open courseware, crowdsourced translation of educational content, as well as social networking.

This year’s Open Education Global conference marks the 10-year anniversary of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. 2017 also marks several important milestones in Open Education, including the 15-year anniversary of the term Open Educational Resources (OER) and the 5 year anniversary of the Paris OER Declaration. The Open Education Global conference has offered the opportunity to celebrate and reflect on these and other achievements, reconnect with colleagues and friends, and learn about new ideas and initiatives.