EALA is an open education resource (OER) project.
EALA is a project that engages and expands our understanding of OER (Open Educational Resources). EALA explores our learning contexts in Scotland and Lapland in regard of available OER as well as creating new resources. EALA builds on previous successful Scottish Arctic educator exchange (e.g. Scottish students co-working with Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish students in the Living in the Landscape Methods Workshop 2022). In celebration of the recent Year of Stories EALA is a timely opportunity to share much more and inform future narratives of Scottish Arctic connection, and creative response including stories, narratives and artworks. This pedagogy centred project is a direct response to an appetite and need for accessible and current case study materials for arts and humanities teaching of Arctic and near Arctic contexts and commons.
EALA, the Scottish Gaelic word for swan, is a Scottish-Arctic alliance for effective educational resource capacity building (OER), enhanced knowledge mobility and efficient partnership working of expert networks across Scotland and Finland, near-Arctic and Arctic ‘circularity’ and interdisciplinary engagement.
OER Pedagogy and Learning Technologies and Open Spaces
The landscape on open education resources is vast and expanding. In this EALA project working we have been fortunate to connect with the expertise and experiences of Scottish open education practitioner Lorna M. Campbell. Lorna is a learning technologist at the University of Edinburgh who has a long standing commitment to open education policy and practice. Lorna shared her experience of open learning technology and introduced the EALA project community to ideas of the ethics and empathy of OER. Further consideration of these ideas can explored through ALT’s Framework for Ethical Learning Technology ( FELT), which is designed to support individuals, organisations and industry in the ethical use of learning technology across sectors, and Open Education and OER: A guide and call to action for policy makers Lorna also discusses issues relating to open education ethics, policy and practice at her own Open World blog.
“What I want to look at today is what we mean when we talk about openness in relation to digital teaching and learning spaces, resources, communities and practices. I also want to highlight the boundaries that demarcate these open spaces, the hierarchies that exist within them, and look at who is included and who is excluded. And I want to explore what we can do to make our open spaces more diverse and inclusive by removing systemic barriers and structural inequalities and by engaging both staff and students in the co-creation of our own teaching and learning experience.”
Lorna M. Campbell (2020)
Further Reading: Campbell, L.M., (2020), The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Cocreation. In Bali, M., Cronin, C., Czerniewicz, L, de Rosa, R., and Jhangiani, R. (eds), Open At The Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education, The Rebus Community. https://press.rebus.community/openatthemargins/
Attribution: The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation by Lorna M. Campbell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
EalaCreative 