OE Global 2019

With the population soaring, humans are rapidly outgrowing Planet Earth. Twenty thousand years ago, a mere blink of the eye in geological terms, humans had a negligible impact on the planet. Now, we are causing huge, potentially irreversible, problems and are destroying our home.

We need to act quickly at this critical moment in history, yet democracy and other structures we’ve looked to help are failing us. We have technology racing ahead of user understanding and human survival is literally under threat.

What we need is quality education. Learning by students who not only explore the internet landscape alone, but who are scaffolded by skilled educators in an environment that promotes soft skills along with broad knowledge about the world we live in and an attitude of involvement. Education that supports the attainment of all of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

To be most effective, such educators need skills, great tools and constant support and resources. Simply having good content available on the internet is not enough - these things need to be part of the natural affordances and workflow around a teacher.

It’s proposed that well-designed open technology provides the best and most proven way to do this globally with widespread adoption and customisation, and present some case studies, including Moodle and MoodleNet.

Outcomes will be presented from a very recent conference (OpenEdTech Global in Barcelona, November 2019) that brought together people involved in various open education technology projects to begin collaborating on deciding what a ubiquitous and long-lasting open education technology platform could look like.