Open Education Global Awards Observatory IFE for Best Open Curation / Repository

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The Open Education Awards for Excellence provide annual recognition to outstanding contributions in the Open Education community, recognizing exemplary leaders, distinctive Open Educational Resources, and Open Practices from around the world.

On October 15th, 2021, Open Education Global announced the winners of the Open Asset category of the Open Education Awards for Excellence. We are proud to announce that the Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education and the University of Edinburgh share this year’s Best Open Curation / Repository prize!

This is the second time we have received an award for contributing to the open educational resources movement. In 2017 we won the Best Open Educational Collection award, given by the Open Education Consortium (OEC), now Open Educational Global. In addition, we are the only initiative from Latin America among the list of winners this year in which projects from universities and organizations from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, France, South Africa, and Spain stand out. So we are thrilled to add another achievement in this category and continue our contribution to the global OER movement.

Every year, Open Education Global has recognized the brilliance within the Open Education sector through its Open Education Awards for Excellence. The winners of these awards represent works that “encapsulate the movement’s aspirations, further inspire outstanding achievements, and add immeasurably to the shared wealth of the open education community.” This year, there are four major focuses with 16 award categories in total—a testament to the significant growth in the Open Education movement worldwide.

Open assets are what open education initiatives produce and use, tangible goods (usually digital) with educational purpose and value. Open assets are produced, curated, and distributed in ways that make them freely accessible, usable, and improvable by others.

The Open Assets Awards recognize these resources in four different categories:

1. Best OER: High-quality, innovative teaching and learning materials openly available online for everyone to use, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. These can be presented in the form of:

Open Course (OCW/MOOC)
Open textbook
Video / Simulation / Animation
Audio / Audiobook

2. Open Curation / Repository: An exceptional collection of high-quality OER presented after a curation process. More than merely collecting content on a specific subject, strong curation involves carefully selecting content and evaluating it for a specific purpose. Presenting it in a meaningful and organized way that can then be customized and re-shared for future users.

3. Open Reuse / Remix/ Adaptation: An outstanding example of OER reuse, remix, or adaptation. This may include examples of significant iterative improvements of resources, including translation and localization.

4. Open Infrastructure: Open Infrastructure is the set of technologies that enables openness. It encompasses open-source tools that enable the creation of open educational resources, their use in an educational context, their curation, improvement, and remixing, as well as sharing. The “infrastructure” is wider than just open-source software, though: it also includes open hardware used in education, open standards enabling interoperability, as well as other open technologies that are instrumental for open education.