I’m pleased to be invited and deliver the keynote on Open Learning at the International IEEE EDUCON Conference 2016: I will speak about “Open Learning for Smart Education: Open educational policies, strategies and access for all”. This year EDUCON is taking place from 10th to 13th of April 2016 in Abu Dhabi.

My questions of the keynote on open learning will be: What is Open Education? Why do we need to change education? How can we collaborate and share our methodologies and resources for mutual benefits?

The need for open learning to change education

There is broad consensus that education has to change: It has to reflect and answer the challenges of rapidly growing globalisation and changes in societies (both leading to uncertain needs even in short terms) and should be changed by opening-up. But what does it mean? Open Education is manifold: It can be related to quite diverse approaches and understandings. Generally, open education is related to learning innovations and learning quality changing the educational environments and offering selections of methodologies, tasks and resources by the learners. Policies for opening-up education by innovations like technology-enhanced learning, online cooperation and digital courses including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other phenomena have achieved first awareness and agreement, such as the UNESCO OER Declaration and the new launched policies by the European Commission with its policy “Opening up Education” and the Government of the Philippines with its national law. MOOCs have immediately attracted the masses even though it is just another label for a diversity of different online learning scenarios and methodologies that were already developed and implemented many years before. On the other hand MOOCs have prepared the future path for opening up education and currently the European initiative MOOQ for the quality of MOOCs has started to develop a common Quality Reference Framework for improving, assessing and comparing the quality of MOOCs.

I’m looking forward to initiate the discussion will all EDUCON participants as well as with all interested stakeholders worldwide. More information about IEEE EDUCON 2016: http://www.educon-conference.org