Quality Education: Students can create a virtual database and tutoring service to provide asynchronous and synchronous volunteer tutoring around the subject and material of their courses. This would push them to become more involved in both their own mastery of course material and involve their community in digital outreach, promotion, and education.
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Excellent ideas! The examples here are inspiring as well!
Great idea. Mental health resources can be so difficult to navigate for those struggling with mental health issues even without the barriers to access.
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I love this idea of looking for successful examples of health from others, especially across cultures.
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The area of health and wellness is what seems most relevant at the moment. I appreciate all of the data sharing I have been seeing to get in-depth information about disease spread in communities and across states and countries. Right now we need much more data collection about disease transmission across racial and minority groups. Creating uniform data-sharing platforms where the technology was accessible to all would help facilitate collecting this information.
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I think SDG 5 and SDG 10 can be focussed on together from an OER standpoint. While it is arguable that SDG 5 is more developed in certain countries, the opposite can be stated for other parts of the world. I believe that teachings on gender equality and any other form of inequality (race, wealth, medical risks etc) should start at the start of every education cycle (letâs generalise and call this primary education, but perhaps even at kindergarten level). I believe that the wide distribution, reuse and revision of OERs could be a big partner in spreading awareness and complete information about inequalities to (young) learners all over the world. One of the core problems regarding inequality is ignorance and misinformation. So by spreading education resources which educate with a focus on equality, every child is able to form a well-informed opinion and will feel empowered to stand up for their own rights.
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SDG10, very clear now in this pandemic environment, the inequalities to medical and healthcare in developing nations and also within nations. My project would involve opening access to medical research for vaccinations so scientists within the country can be a part of developing medicines etc and not rely omn the costs involved importing from wealthier nations. Open access to treatments data. This would be an immense task, but Creative Commons have already started the ball rolling so my access project would or could piggy back on this organisation.
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I think of the SDG 3: good health and well being especially now that we are having the pandemic. Through the OER we can share how we are managing the pandemic in different regions. Then we can also share the cultural ways of reducing the spread of the diseases in our communities since it is a global problem.
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Gender equality is of huge importance to achieving equity in power, economics, education, and other areas. I think a project in this area that could work is rewriting existing texts or great works (like speeches) to show the important role women played in history. For example, instead of just discussing how men went to the moon - rewrite and existing work to show how women helped (as seen in the book Hidden Figures). Or, in textbooks, where discussing the Founding Fathers, the role of women could be integrated alongside the existing text.
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BACKGROUND
I looked at Quality Education SDG4 Tab, Targets and Indicators, Goal 4A
âBuild and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all.â
This is the only goal on that list without a target date. The goal is built out by 4.A.1 which focuses on material provisions of buildings, equipment and basic facilities such as drinking water and rest rooms. However, the overarching goal is to âimprove learning outcomes for the full life cycle, especially for women, girls and marginalized people in vulnerable settings.â
I wonder what the link is between this provision of material assets and the improvement of outcomes, which is a pedagogical goal. Buying stuff is a familiar response of politicians to the problem of âimproving schoolsâ and I am normally cynical about attempts to improve teaching and learning by upgrading the landscaping. Maybe my own students would be less cynicalâŚ
PROBLEM
So, I would throw this out to them as a learning project. I would build it around a project by Apache, a US based oil company, to build one room schools for girls in Egypt, called Springboard. You can read about that here:
Springboard: Educating the Future - Building Schools in Egypt
MODEL
My model would be David Wileyâs student lead project to write a course book / manual on Project Management for Instructional Designers. Wiley discusses this briefly in his Blog post, What is Open Pedagogy?.
This learning project is built as a problem based learning activity. That is, I do not know what the answer to the question is, and probably no one does. It does not trundle, like a train, to any predetermined destination. I would hesitate even to declare any closely defined research questions or lines of inquiry, or to speculate narrowly about outcomes. Doing this might adversely affect the development of the activity and, in any rate, questions and outcomes could all be negotiated with students, in the course of the activity.
DESCRIPTION
Broadly, I would ask what the connection might be between improvement of the space in which education takes place, and the quality of that education. What is meant by an âeducational environmentâ? What is quality? How might the improvement of plant transfer to the improvement of outcomes?
The OER deliverable might be a white paper, an article in an open research journal, an entry in Wikipedia, a local legislative proposal, a presentation to a school board, or any other thing that might have an impact in the world.
I would consider designing the activity to align broadly with institutional learning outcomes relating to critical thinking, collaborative and team work, spoken and written language competencies, research skills, and numerical and quantitative reasoning.
This could serve as a medium to long term project (6 to 12 weeks, 60 to 120 hours) in any discipline relating to any of the core outcomes: critical thinking, collaborative learning⌠etc.
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I like how you have linked these two Sustainable Development Goals together. SDG5 is about gender equality while SDG10 is primarily about economic disparities within and among countries. SDG5 is culturally sensitive in ways that SDG10 is not, or at least, is to a lesser degree. Using discussion of economic inequalities as an avenue into gender inequalities could have considerable merit.
I grew up in the US but lived most of my adult life abroad. Coming back after 40 yearsâ absence I found many of problems here that were also common talking points among well-meaning Westerners speculating about the developing world. I think that when we talk about development, we should not assume that our communities are more advanced or better off than any others. We all have problems and we can all learn from one another.
This is really interesting. It reminds me of the work of B F Fuller, a lot of which was about sustainability of communities. His dome home and dymaxion house are two examples. Both offered affordable, high quality housing alternatives. The geodesic dome became very popular in the 70s and I still see these structures around the Southwestern US.
Another interesting initiative was a collaboration between Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy and a New York socialite, Simone Swan, to build low cost adobe homes in the Rio Grande Valley. Fathy specialized in adobe buildings.
Sustainable living initiatives have always struggled to gain traction in the mainstream. Housing initiatives in particular come into immediate conflict with the combined forces of banking, insurance, and construction industries, all of which have a direct interest in maintaining high cost housing.
OER resources might address this problem by making information freely available about the many aspects of sustainable living to bring these alternatives within closer reach of struggling communities.
Currently during the lockdown zero hunger project looks more serious. On the one hand the daily wage workers and hungry and on the other hand the farmers are not able to sell their product due to the broken supply chain.
OER might address this problem by creating a demand supply chain.
Also they will learn about not disturbing the natural ecological balance in the system
This learning project addresses SDG 3 - Good Health & Well-being
Project Title: Emotional Mapping and Community Resilience Project
Description: Using entirely open educational resources and open-source software, engage students in a peer-based active learning project built around civic engagement and service learning that provides their community with a way to map, tag, contribute, share, consume and interact with information about the emotions of their community that will lead to people: Avoiding Stress, Sharing - Learning Coping Techniques - Finding Peace - building shared community experiences and stories.
Activity and Output: Students will create a free, web-based GIS platform and on-line questionnaire so that community members can mark-up and tag map locations to indicate emotions associated with the location. Participants can quickly pin-drop their emotional state from a clickable scale (happy, sad, angry, peacefulâŚ), contribute written narratives, upload pictures, videos, etc. Participants can also reflect / react and comment on otherâs content. The output is a constellation of shared emotional experiences, stories, knowledge, wisdom and inquiry. Community members can then reuse, revise, remix, redistribute and repurpose the content within the project, or on other projects.
Learning Outcomes:
- Experiential and Service Learning: participatory community engagement, cohort peer-based active learning, cooperation, group work, interpersonal communication, community organizing, project management, product development
- Skills & Methodology: Universal Design fundamentals (UDL), GIS fundamentals (i.e. QGIS3), open-source web dev software skills (i.e.XAMPP [Apache, PHP, MySQL], Komodo Edit, KompoZer), ethnography and survey methodology (i.e. Maian Survey), digital storytelling, visual literacy.
Assessment:
By using SAM iterative design / development model (or whatever suits you), cohorts have recurring opportunities to reflect, criticize and review their progress. Within each cohort formative assessment takes place with facilitation and guidance of the instructor throughout the SAM model process. Summative assessment is through the demonstration of competencies found in the product design / function; and success of community participation and use the final product. Much of this is inspired by the course work of anthropologist David Syring)
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I think that last sentence is absolutely the crux of it. We need to talk, discuss, and most importantly, listen in order to learn from each other. There is so much to learn if we set aside all preconceived notions and prejudices. If this was taught in a serious manner from an early age, I firmly believe that the coming generations could achieve so much more. Especially because it seems to be a global tendency to stick to your own opinions, rather than to listen carefully and take the time to formulate a proper argument or response.
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I think this is a wonderful idea! A cMOOC such as we are taking now would be a great way to do this, particularly if there were established scholars involved who might be willing to mentor some of the learners.
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for the course on sharing and learning writing for journals, there would not be a shortage of professionals who are willing to mentor participants.
Fully agree. I work in the Asia Pacific region with young practitioners and graduates, and I know there is great interest among them for such capacity development to enhance their careers (many universities do not offer these courses). Even abstracts writing skills will improve across the board if sufficient training were provided. As you said, there would be established professionals willing to be mentors â there is no lack of them.
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SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 4
Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
I believe quality education to be the key component of a personâs growth and development. Hence we need to address the concern of people who lack access to technology and tools to empower them with this holy grail of education. Education instills innovative ideas and sophistications among educational aspirants, with which a healthy civilisation is fostered implying sustainable human growth and development. I definitely would love to render my participation in such a project aiming at equal and quality education to all. Thank you for the opportunity to ponder into this topic and present my views here.
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