OER: POLICY AND BEST PRACTICES FROM ROMANIA
OER: POLICY AND BEST PRACTICES FROM ROMANIA

Summary/Abstract: This paper builds on the practical experience gained during a 6 months project focused on awareness activities on open educational resources (OER) for librarians and academics in Romania. The aim of our project was to train the participants about OER and Creative Commons licenses and their advantages, as well as encourage them to search for CC materials, find out how to use them and, more importantly understand how and why it is useful to produce materials under open licenses. The findings focus on best practices from Romania; at the same time policy issues related to OER at a national level are brought forth, specifically by identifying key actors and their interests and how these are reflected in the national debate concerning the digital textbooks. We will include information on the newly created OER Coalition that was set up at the national level at the end of 2013. Starting from explaining the open licenses up to how the resources are aggregated, the workshops held aimed to clarify confusing aspects with regards to open educational resources and also how these are affecting the educational process. An important point for consideration was given to the rise of the MOOCs as tools for individual training as a complementary educational process to the traditional one. More efforts were put into giving insights with regards to different types of resources needed to put together training and learning materials that one would call an open educational resource. Starting from different open media outlets (Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive etc.), up to the different grades of open licensing applied to the final aggregated resource many revealing inroads were unfolded to those who attended the workshops and also to many others given the media resulted from the workshops and the freely and openly distributed materials created during the project.

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