To help you plan your participation the conference program schedule can be filtered by date, venue, session type, and session format using the Filter functions.
Filter by Date lets you look at a specific day of the program. Filter by Venue lets you look at the program by venue rooms where sessions are taking place. Filter by Type lets you look at the program by track. In addition to keynotes and breaks the program is made up of three main tracks or types of sessions Pedagogy, Roles, and Strategies. Clicking on a type in Filter by Type lets you see only sessions of that type in the program schedule. In addition, Pedagogy, Roles, and Strategies each have a set of associated topics. Topics appear when you hover over a type name in the Filter by Type area of Sched. Topics are clickable allowing you to further filter the program by topic. Session Format lets you view the program by types of sessions - Action Labs, Lightning Talks, Posters, Presentations, and World Cafes.
The conference program is rich and diverse representing the current state of open education around the world.
Have you noticed that we see many creative ideas on how artificial intelligence can be harnessed in education and indeed on how open educational resources can enable more equal access to higher education and to better learning materials – but we are often less creative when we think of the resulting higher education landscape! Most foresight studies centre their ideas on how the university as an institution will look in the future. I will argue that we should start by re-envisioning people’s learning pathways. I will also argue that it makes sense to be bolder in our ideas of the role of higher education. I will suggest that a leading vision for higher (or tertiary) education should be: To ensure that all members of society participate in higher education at some point in their lifetime.This might sound unrealistic, but with it I hope that we might achieve an important change in perspective. This vision might help us avoid the continuing exclusivity of higher education – which tends to privilege a certain age group (the young) and people of certain backgrounds (what we call in German education-proximal populations, e.g. those people, whose parents attended higher education). This vision is also appropriate for the learning society we need, which will necessitate new phases of learning throughout everyone’s lifetime. Ignoring this in the case of higher education will only lead to a digital divide along the age groups, with older persons being left out of strategies to help them acquire the skills necessary to a better life in a digital world. Of course, this vision can only be achieved if we can evolve a more differentiated approach to higher education that is more individualised and more closely linked to people’s learning pathways throughout their life and which takes account of informal and non-formal learning – and not just formal learning periods as ‘registered’ or ‘enrolled’ learner. I look forward to the discussion.
Research Lead, University of Nova Gorica / Kiron Open Higher Education
Dr. Dominic Orr has dual citizenship in Britain and Germany. He has a doctorate in comparative education from the Technical University of Dresden and was recently appointed Adjunct Professor for Management in Education at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia.Dominic currentl... Read More →
