English version: Michelle Fidelholc
As part of the Private Social Investment Week of the 9th #CongressoGIFE (a Brazilian Congress on social investment), and with support from IED and Ação Educativa, the OER-Brazil community members conveyed for the first time in a single meeting, players of various profiles: NGOs experienced in producing teaching materials, corporate stakeholders, public school teachers and publishing industry professionals.
The goal was to devise and develop prototypes that could inspire an open education and OER (open educational resources) pilot project in public schools in São Paulo. Since 2011, São Paulo is the first of Brazil’s OER public policy cases, through the Decree 52681. However, even with a regulatory framework, open practices and OER production by educators and students are quite shy. Among the reasons are the lack of knowledge about these possibilities and use of flexible licenses.
Deborah Sebriam, IED’s project coordinator and OER.br’s communications manager, opened the meeting with a brief presentation of the concept, its history and cited advancements in this field in other countries such as USA, Poland and South Africa. Oona Castro, leader of the OER research held by the Wikimedia Foundation, pointed out how the Brazilian initiatives in this field are scattered and sometimes mix up the concepts of “openness” (which allows various uses and remixes) and “gratuity” (which only allows access without editing).
Gustavo Paiva, from Ação Educativa, brought the results of another recently launched research on the growing presence of the private reading meterials (apostilled) didatic system in Brazilian Municipal Education Departments, which could compromise the right to education. Despite the fact the Departments get books distributed by the Ministry of Education, many of them choose to buy ready-to-use materials that are produced by publishers (workbooks and training) rather than making themselves their municipal education plans or stimulating authorial production by educators.
Next, IED’s executive director, Priscila Gonsales, conducted the practical activity based on the Design Thinking methodology, focusing on the challenge: How can we… develop an OER pilot project on São Paulo’s Municipal Education Department (SME-SP), considering the authorship of educators and students?
See below a summary of the ideas that can be improved or integrated with each other to be actually implemented. Private companies who are interested in supporting the implementation of these ideas can get in touch with us: contato@educadigital.org.br
Open Olympics – Aiming to build OER in different formats and based on the community’s needs, the project would stimulate the role of students, teachers and the entire community to create solutions to São Paulo’s main regional problems. The identification of these problems could be useful for the government agencies, as a source of information of what public policy improvements need to be addressed. On the other hand, the solutions created by the schools would have to be integrated to the pedagogic program so that learning is evident and, moreover, publishing it as an OER means it can be adapted to other contexts besides the city of São Paulo. Funding could come from the education department itself, with support from private enterprise.
OER development by school units – What if… SME-SP would establish a policy of hiring institutions and associations to promote OER development in each of its schools? These institutions would co-create with the school units to ensure the production of quality material, as it would be reviewed by many people. This could be promoted to the private sector, especially companies in the field of technology and information and content production, such as Google and commercial publishers that could join the project by investing financial resources or offering services. The important thing is that the funds would be administered by the schools themselves, via parent-teacher associations or others, so they also get to learn to do financial management, performance reports and accountability.
SME-SP’s current guidelines absorbing OER as a result – currently, both the schools’ incentive to democratically participate in creating quality indicators for education, and the implementation of authorial actions and projects by students (for example, the 9th grade experimental projects) are part of the SME-SP’s policy. The group proposed an improvement in this policy so that OER is the signed brand of the productions, to further value teachers’ and students’ work. For this, it would be great to organize a congress or specific seminar to train technical staff and educators on flexible licenses and on the existing Municipal Decree. Another suggestion is to create a public edict that guides on how to create OER. The group also suggested an online environment that allows these authorial productions to be shared to inspire other departments in adopting the same practice.
#congressogife #euvounocongressogife
Many good people gathered! Thank you all!!!
Leia aqui o post original em Português
