Using open education practices across the Mediterranean for intercultural curriculum development in higher education

ABSTRACT

This multinational authored article presents the findings and recommendations of a three-year, European-funded project ‘OpenMed: Opening up education in South Mediterranean countries’, which brought together five higher education partners from Europe and nine from the South Mediterranean region. This was the first cross-European initiative to promote the adoption of Open Educational Practices (OEP) within higher education involving educational institutions in each of the countries. A three-phase project design included gathering and analyzing case studies of OEPs globally, and, in particular, in the South Mediterranean; the organization of regional forums to encourage priorities for change; and the multi-national design and pilot implementation of a ‘training of trainers’ course for academic capacity building in OEPs as part of curricula reform. We will discuss how the cultural approaches used among experts and project partners with different national, linguistic, and educational backgrounds have instigated change in policy and practice at a personal, institutional, and national level.

KEYWORDS:

• Open education practices
• international collaboration
• intercultural
• dewesternization
• higher education

Acknowledgments

The OpenMed project is based on the work of a number of higher education institutions as part of the Consortium, namely: University names

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://openmedproject.eu.

2 https://openmedproject.eu/results/compendium/.

3 https://openmedproject.eu/open-education-experts/.

4 https://openmedproject.eu/recommendations/.

5 Starting from an understanding of the long-term challenges and priorities which are necessary for opening up HE in the S-M countries, the Educational Resources (OER) Regional Agenda presents a set of strategic actions aimed at maximising the benefits of OER and OEP to increase the access, the quality and the equity of HE in the region.

6 https://openmedproject.eu/oer-morocco-declaration/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission Erasmus+: Higher Education – International Capacity Building Programme, under [Grant Agreement Number – 2015–3166/001-001] and Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union [Project number: 561651-EPP-1-2015-1-IT-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP] (October 2015–October 2018).