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Opportunity Details

By the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)

The open education community has strived to ensure that education is equitable, accessible and participatory since the early days of the open education movement. As we look ahead to the future of open education, a major challenge remains: bridging the “islands of information” that exist across open education repositories, which ultimately impacts adoption and use of open educational resources (OER) globally. Making education open in practice requires being able to discover materials across open libraries and repositories, giving users maximum visibility into relevant materials across platforms.

In our workshop session, members of the ISKME team will present the Open Metadata Exchange (OME), a proposed solution to this challenge. OME is a decentralized network of open libraries designed to serve as a force multiplier in the search, discovery, and sustainability of OER. By making it easier for libraries to share, discover, and reuse metadata while maintaining their own local standards and control, it addresses issues such as duplicated efforts to discover, tag, and curate similar materials across platforms, as well as approaches to metadata that make cross-platform cataloging cumbersome.

We see decentralisation not only as a technical solution, but as a way to build a more resilient and sustainable open education ecosystem; one that can continue to preserve, connect and share knowledge regardless of changing circumstances and uncertainties over time. This initiative is particularly timely, as recent events have highlighted just how vulnerable open resources and repositories can be.

We envision the OME as a system that is collectively stewarded by those within the open source and open education communities. In that spirit, the workshop will not only cover how the OME works and what participation in the OME looks like, but also to engage conference participants in discussions to encourage collaborative exploration of how the OME can benefit open knowledge infrastructure that supports open education, as well as to identify ways in which they can participate or contribute to the development of the OME and its governance. We hope you’ll join us at OER26 on Monday, June 22nd at 2:00 pm to explore the possibilities, contribute your ideas, and help co-create a more connected and collaborative future for open education–whether you are a librarian, repository manager, metadata specialist, educator, researcher, or someone who believes in the promise of open education.