Track Session Type

Sustainability: Grant Acquisition & Management, Sustainability, Engaging Student Leaders, OER for Resilience, OER Community Building, OER and Technology

Presentation Type

Roundtable or Special Interest Group Discussion

OER Level of Expertise

Beginner

Audience

Faculty, Librarian, instructional designer, Administrator

Beyond Affordability: Collaboration, Reuse, Translation and Localization of OER in Ukraine

Session Abstract

Through our storytelling of a recent event in 2023, we would like to demonstrate the power of OER as a tool for cross country collaboration, connection and as support for learning communities in Ukraine. We will invite participants to join our collective story, as we explore ways to support Ukrainian colleagues translating and localizing needed skills training amidst war.

Keywords

Ukraine, localization, Italy, communities, war

Objectives of the Session

By the end of this session, attendees will:

• Have a deeper understanding of the Ukrainian context of OER and open education; as well as a clearer perspective of Ukrainian librarians work in times of high-level crisis

• Understand how they can support open education in Ukraine

• Understand how they might adapt the same model to other educational contexts: if it can work in wartime Ukraine, it should work in other contexts.

Full Description of the Session

This presentation shares a real story of how OER enabled reuse and adaptation across countries enabled by networks, humble funds, and growing friendships. It will also be a call to action for audience members to volunteer to support open education in Ukraine, where the need for localized OER is acute.

Our story begins with a local University in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro during the ongoing war. The USUST librarians, staff and faculty were working on an Open Textbooks project. Open Textbooks and OER around specific skills are sorely needed in Ukrainian language. One librarian, Tetiana Kolesnykova, and her colleagues sought to secure and expand access to open education in Ukrainian, at a national level.

They began to collaborate with a European network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) and networks of open education advocates (Creative Commons Open Education Platform and OE Global). Both community networks hoped to support Ukrainians’ open education efforts but lacked significant funds to do so.

With a member of both networks, Ukrainian librarians started a project to translate and localize an award winning MOOC on OER into Ukrainian to upskill Ukrainian librarians and staff. The MOOC was openly licensed, and the librarians secured limited funds to cover some costs.

This experience enabled new OER in Ukrainian. It demonstrates the promise of open education amidst extreme challenges of wartime.

We invite the audience to join us in the next chapter of this story, finding more ways to translate useful OER into Ukrainian.

Presenter Bios

Jennryn Wetzler is the Director of Learning and Training at Creative Commons. She has the pleasure of collaborating with brilliant colleagues around the world, creating new partnerships and trainings to increase access to education, journalism, science and research. Prior to CC, Jennryn worked on open policy and open educational resources (OER) at the U.S. Department of State, piloting OER use for public diplomacy and global partnerships. She’s also enjoyed gaining a different perspective of education through international development work in Thailand and Niger.

Dr. Tetiana Kolesnykova is the Director of the Scientific Library of the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies (USUST), PhD in Social Sciences (Communications), Senior Researcher.

She’s the Head of the Editorial and Publishing Section at the Education Quality Council of USUST; Chairman of the Organising Committee of the international conference "University Library at a New Stage of Social Communications Development" (http://conflib.diit.edu.ua/); Editor-in-Chief of the journal "University Library at a New Stage of Social Communications Development. Conference Proceedings" (http://unilibnsd.diit.edu.ua); Indexing in Scopus; Chief issue editor of the journal "Anthropological Measurements of Philosophical Research" (http://ampr.diit.edu.ua); Indexing in WoS; Head of the Section of University Libraries of the Ukrainian Library Association (ULA); and member of the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL; SPARC Europe), as well as Creative Commons Open Education Platform and OE Global.

Mira is an academic information specialist at the University of Groningen Library in the Netherlands. She leads and coordinates the Open Education pillar of the University’s Open Science program and is actively engaged in shaping and developing services and infrastructure to support and train academics in the area of open educational resources and practices. Mira gained her academic background and professional experience in Ukraine and the Netherlands in the fields of international relations, political science, education, and communications. Mira takes an active interest in open science and education developments, participates in national and European community-led projects, and is driven by the values of access to education, social justice, and sustainable development.

Publishing Permission

1

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Presenters

Jennryn Wetzler, Creative CommonsFollow
Tetiana Kolesnykova, Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies (USUST) - Scientific LibraryFollow
Mira Buist-Zhuk, University of Groningen - LibraryFollow

Start Date

5-4-2024 10:00 AM

End Date

5-4-2024 10:50 AM