Open Educational Resources (OER) and other forms of open education (like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)) are promising to be reused in vocational and higher education, thereby realizing more efficiency, a higher quality and better access to quality education. However, most of these resources are about knowledge exchange and less about skills development. This could have consequences on the adoption of OER within vocational education and training, both in regular education as in training on the job and professional development programs. The OER Research group within FHICT has performed a research project, commissioned by UNESCO, to find out about adoption of OER in Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET). The talk will go into some of the findings, like an overview of barriers, policies and good practices. The talk will especially highlight the role companies can take in co-creating these open resources with educational institutions.
Robert Schuwer is Professor Open Educational Resources (OER) at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, School of ICT in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In September 2016 he was appointed Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair on OER at Fontys. Since 2006 the majority of his work is about OER and Open Education. Among other activities, he was project leader in the Wikiwijs program, aiming at enhancing awareness on OER and creating a national infrastructure for OER, initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Education. His current research is on adoption of OER and other forms of open online education by the early and late majority of teachers. He is chairman of the SURF Dutch Special Interest Group Open Education.