Unesco Chaire in Open Educational Resources
From 2013 to 2016 project COCo[1], supported by the CominLabs, allowed us to explore the enrichment of open educational resources: since videos are the support of more and more educational material, it was interesting to propose technological solutions enabling to annotate videos, accept discussions to take place anywhere in a video, align videos with text, propose scenarii in which teacher and students could build upon a video.
The project was well received by the community and we got a lot of encouragement from Cominlabs, its researchers, officers and the international advisory committee.
The experience gained through the project was used in 2015 when preparing project Class’Code accepted by the PIA2. This project, currently running, aims at training the teachers and educators, in France, to code and computational thinking. The better understanding we had got during COCo of the mechanisms of open education were put into practice in Class’Code[2].
The lessons learnt were also at the core of the proposal submitted by University of Nantes to the Unesco, who labelled a chair in 2017. The Unesco chair in technologies for the training of teachers by open educational resources, at University of Nantes, is being launched in September 2017.
A Unesco chair is not a grant, not a prize. It is a responsibility. In this case many goals to be accomplished with the different partners
The firm belief is that if education is a sustainable development goal for the Unesco[3], and open education is a powerful means to achieve the ambitions set forward, more research and technology is needed for that. This is the project the chair is about.
Colin de la Higuera, Chairholder of the Unesco OER chair at University of Nantes
1. http://coconotes.comin-ocw.org/
2. https://pixees.fr/classcode/
