Hi @Melanie
Agreed supporting and promoting digital fluency for learners is a growing need in today’s world.
We’ve made a small start with the OERu’s Learning in a Digital Age series of micro-courses. LiDA103 is one of four micro-courses.
As OER-based courses we hope to reach and support many learners. So far we’ve registered about 5,200 learners and hope to grow these number in the coming months and years.
Good Health & Well-being: Learners could look at examples from different contexts and cultures of how people adjusted to working from home during the recent COVID-19 crisis, and how people balanced work, home, and health responsibilities. What community initiatives (if any) contributed to this, and how could these be replicated?
Agreed - we need to take a closer look at health and well-being in today’s educational world in general and OER projects specifically.
Of interest, our recent global OER4Covid survey showed that only 14% of respondents reported no stress during these times (n=711 from 85 countries.)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 7
Many people are not able pay electricity bills.Usage of solar panels in home can not only lead to great savings but also protect the environment. The place I came from has summer season most of time. Yet people don’t use solar resource it in home. If students from schools and colleges trained to make their own solar devices and use them, they will be future users of solar energy.
Your second idea is what I was just about to write here! So I’ll have to think of a twist on this. I really like your first idea, with the language/culture exchange.
SDG 5: Gender Equality
College students in a range of courses from different disciplines (women’s studies, social welfare, psychology, business, etc.) might be able to work with young women in a girl’s club, school for girls, etc. to determine what inequality issues they feel most keenly, and then the college students might be able to develop an open resource on the topic, and perhaps also provide other advice based upon their expertise/major.
I really like this idea. Later this month we will be running an instance of our micro-course: Digital skills for collaborative OER development. The course focuses on basic design skills for publishing an open course using the OERu’s open source technologies. Would be great to see if we can launch a few pilots to help refine these ideas.
I don’t have a specific solution, but more of a comment on the idea of no longer having disposable assignments. In my advanced painting class, I have instituted a research paper where my students write about some experimentation they are doing with their process. They write about the different things they have tried and the things they found that worked the best. I then categorize this information and put it on the class webpage for future students to use. It seems to me that, much like this assignment, you could have students come up with solutions for any of the SDG goals and then research and/or test their hypothesis, and as long as their information is kept, and made easy to find and access, it would be invaluable to future people investigating the same problem to learn from and build on. Even if multiple students investigated the same topic, over time it would start to become a large enough sample to be even more valuable data.
Good Health & Well-being: One of the challenges we face is a culturally unresponsive healthcare system. Students in a capstone course could design OER resources for helping healthcare professionals better understand the concerns of the community and potential points of conflict/miscommunication. This could draw on the skills of multiple discplinary groupings - allied health fields, STEM fields, social sciences, humanities - to produce a concrete, solutions-oriented, and open set of resources.
I love the blend of coursework, OER creation and mentorship.
The collaborative effort has the potential to be very effective in producing resources that fit your description. It might be that the healthcare workers could add to the resources as they work with and adapt them to specific needs.
Rain Water harvesting should be mandatory in all countries.
OER can be seen a way of providing a written component (for learning) to something that is normally more action-oriented. I remember being shocked in my college days–every term I choose different types of one-credit courses in physical education (swimming, weight training, yoga, etc.) as a way of getting away from my studies in order to give my body a workout instead of my mind (thus for more balance in my life). The shock was that each of these courses included a written exam!
Related to UN goal #10: Reducing Inequalities–we’ve seen either governments, private organizations, or simply individuals give boxes of food to the needy during the current Corona Virus pandemic. Perhaps schools have even asked students to write essays, etc. on this. By creating OER-style written components to such acts of compassion, educators can make learning about goal #10 more sustainable and less sporadic.
I believe quality education plays the major role in achieving the SDGs. Hence, I am thinking of a project that would contribute to this goal.
Project idea: In times of pandemic, like what is happening right now, learning or education per se became hard to achieve. Students can’t even access the learning materials the teachers tried to post online as internet here is a major hindrance to online learning. Hence, I am thinking of a blended approach. OPEN HUB. This could be a infrastructure, a hub, where access to learning resources is unlimited. And people can also contribute in to building the hub into more huge space where everything you would need should be there, either online or offline.
Learning Project - Create a Quality Premier League similar to the football leagues where students come together online in village teams from a developing context to share ‘‘premeier’’ league strategies and appraoches for bridging basic needs, technology needs, and factors of quality in education. Each team would be responsible for formulating a game plan for their village as part of the OER course The League rankings would only be pass/fail. Virtual awards could also be created - Village of the Years, Most Valuable Strategy, Sportsmanship for Quality, etc.
Excellent especially a version for developing countires where women equality issues are even more profound. Great idea. Rock on!
I think about a " Open Mental Health Platform" to build a healthy and resourceful community. Who will learn and share there thoughts using OER to promote mental health related issues and research to enhance good health and well being for the society.
An idea of a learning project for SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 17:
Learners and students share and learn about how to seek and form partnerships to implement ideas on any or every SDGs.
This involves discussing ideas on strengthening the means of implementing SDGs, and how to go about it through global collaboration.
An inspiration is the recent Oxford University Students Against Corona group that responded to the need for food deliveries, using video and textual explanation of the safest way to carry out operations. It rapidly mobilised, and has been transformed into, a global collaboration with similar groups set up all over the world tending to localised needs that engage medical professionals and all kinds of volunteers.
Another idea that I suppose may relate to quality education, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 4, is a course on sharing and learning writing for journals, writing abstracts, outlines, peer review, etc… This can benefit many young scholars and practitioners, particularly in the developing regions, who receive insufficient opportunities and training to contribute to academic publishing, and allowed their research and ideas to be widely disseminated. It can also increase their professional confidence and widen the sharing of knowledge for all who are interested in publishing in journals.
SDG 15 - Life on Land: Develop an open educational resource focusing on global responses to land management and deforestation. Students would be encouraged to produce a project about a piece of land or forest near them. What ecosystems are being supported? Who owns the land? The students would then present and discuss their work in a classroom or online forum and vote for the best ones which would be included in the OER and made available to other learners.
This would encourage students to think about land management and ecosystems in both a local and global context and hopefully spark an interest in caring for the world around them.
Sustainable Cities and Communities: Design a community from scratch that addresses elements of sustainability, livability, affordability, attractiveness, and maintainability. The community should house at least 100 people from across a spectrum of age groups i.e. children to seniors. Students should access open educational content related to the five elements previously described ensuring attribution for the content accessed. The final project should include not only written descriptions of the five elements, but also illustrations and video to support the written descriptions. The final project must be suitable to release as an open educational resource.