Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Towards Transversal Skills and Global Citizenship

This year will be remembered by Leo Havemann and me as the Open Data year, because we spent it digging, exploring  and researching about how Open Data can be used as OER, because we believe that embedding Open Data in the curriculum can help students to develop numerous literacies including statistical, digital and reporting skills, but moreover, is a way to relate academic activities with the problems of the society aiming at developing active and conscious citizens.

Today we got published our latest piece of research titled   Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Towards Transversal Skills and Global Citizenship which “offers an initial exploration of ways in which the use of Open Data can be key in the development of transversal skills (including digital and data literacies, alongside skills for critical thinking, research, teamwork, and global citizenship), enhancing students’ abilities to understand and select information sources, to work with, curate, analyse and interpret data, and to conduct and evaluate research, and also presents results of an exploratory survey that can guide further research into Open Data-led learning activities aiming to support educators in empowering students to engage, critically and collaboratively, as 21st century global citizens“.

By saying it has been a year, I think is fair to rewind to where all started: a blogpost we called The 21st Century’s Raw Material: Using Open Data as Open Educational Resources  in which we described the initial and exploratory ideas to support students to think like scientists and policy makers and to acquire research skills. We initially used this post to call academics and practitioners in sharing their practices in the use of Open Data in teaching and learning .

So, after recruiting volunteers to share their good practices, we were joined by our friends to help us publishing these practices as case studies, to thanks to  Marieke Guy, William Hammonds, Paul Bacsich, Elena Stojanovska, Santiago Martín, Anne-Christin Tannhäuser, Maria Perifanou, Chiara Ciociola, Luigi Reggi, Tim Coughlan, Juan Pablo Alperin, Katie Shamash, Alessandra Bordini, Alan Dix, Geoffrey Ellis and Virginia Power  in early November 2015 we published a book called Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Case studies of emerging practice,  the process of editing and putting this book together has been described in the previous post called Tales from the unexpected journey: Open Data as Open Educational Resources which I hope you enjoy reading.

— Nota en Castellano —

Si te interesa saber más sobre los datos abiertos en la docencia, puedes visitar la página Datos abiertos como recursos educativos abiertos (diseñada por el inigualable Gustavo Soto) o puedes darle una leída a la columna el el blog del BID:  Cómo los Datos Abiertos pueden ayudar a potenciar la Educación Universitaria en colaboración con el gran Nelson Piedra