The Creative Commons Open Education Team is pleased to provide a snapshot of progress made toward opening access and equity in education, through a look at our collective efforts in 2022.¹ We laud the CC open education community for its important work throughout 2022. CC and community members’ open education efforts in 2022 included, but were not limited to:

“Creative Commons a vessel ideas” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0..

We ran a successful French translation, as well as the first ever Spanish language sprint for the CC Certificate course reading content. Thanks to the efforts of CC Certificate graduates and additional translators,² 569 million more people will have access to CC Certificate open educational resources (OER) in their native languages. These published works enable 493 million native Spanish speakers and 76 million native French speakers to access translations in their languages — not to mention others who have Spanish or French as a second language.

CC continued its partnership with InclusiveAccess.org, a community-driven initiative that launched in 2021, to raise awareness of the facts about textbook sales models that add the cost of digital course materials into students’ tuition and fees. Learn more about it in our Open Minds Podcast interview with Trudi Radke.

We interviewed Jennifer Miller about her Open Syllabus for Open Science project (see lightning talk below), which provides a complete but flexible way for early career researchers to learn about open science.

We ran CC Open Education Lightning Talks in March and August. Lightning talks are concise presentations that provide a specific update or story. During the talks, open education practitioners highlighted OER into capstone courses, discussed funding opportunities within open education, and explored how the CC Network can provide support for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Practitioners also discussed leveraging tax legislation for open education funding, theories and practices around OER, fireside stories of open sharing, and even led a Texas Sing-a-long! 

• “Open Syllabus: UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science” by Jennifer Miller. 
• “More OER for Free!” by Jonathan Poritz.
• “Open Climate Campaign” by Dr. Cable Green, and Dr. Monica Granados
• “Building OER into Capstone Courses” by Dr. Carolyn Stevenson
• “Improve It Challenge” by Jamison Miller
• “Enabling OERs at no additional cost” by Kathryn Kure
• “Promoting Educational Equity through OERs and Open Degree Plans” by Carolyn Stevenson 
• “The Venn Diagram of OEP and Ungrading is a Circle” by Sybil Priebe 
• “Still Amazing: True Stories of Openness” by Alan Levine 
• “Student Scholars: Publishing Student OER Work” by Liza Long 
•  “Evolution of a state-wide OER Initiative” by Suzanne Wakim
• “Deep in the Open Heart of Texas” by Judith Sebesta 

CC continued to engage global partners and stakeholders in our work on Open Education.

CC staff and network colleagues presented at six regional UNESCO hosted meetings to support national governments and NGOs in understanding and implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Education Resources. We highlighted the importance of using standard international CC open copyright licenses in open education policies and open educational resources (slides).

CC participated in the United Nations Transforming Education Summit, presenting sessions on effective educational ecosystems, approaches to implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, and our recently launched Open Climate Campaign.

CC is working with UNICEF and others to find OER curriculum and openly licensed psycho-social support materials to help Syrian and Turkish children and their teachers who have been displaced by the devastating earthquakes.

The CC team expanded our Certificate program. We ran 16 online courses in 2022, raising the total number of graduates to over 1255 from 65 countries by the end of 2022. We piloted two open pedagogy CC Certificate courses in September, which encouraged participants’ greater agency in the course and also as contributions to their larger communities.  

We also launched the CC Certificate for GLAM with three courses and 93 participants. With Evelin Heidel (nickname: Scann), we were able to also offer a facilitator training for this program, thereby certifying additional instructors to teach the course. We also offered 38 scholarships to Certificate participants, expanding the program’s global reach. The CC Certificate program also continued facilitation and evaluation measures, ensuring the CC Certificate program is on a trajectory of continuous improvement. Thanks to Jonathan Poritz’s analysis, we learned four key takeaways from evaluating the CC Certificate.

Aside from the CC Certificate courses, CC continued its training, including a workshop for the U.S. Department of State’s TechCamp Morocco, thanks to facilitation from Shanna Hollich; a workshop for the UK National Lottery Heritage Fund, and training for Open Education Fellows at Lafayette College, among others. 

In addition to these efforts, many more community members noted their work advancing open education in CC Open Education Platform meetings, ongoing conversations and collaborations. While we cannot cite everyone’s efforts here, we are honored to work with and learn from this community. Interested in joining us? If you are not yet a member, learn more about the CC Open Education Platform – we hope to hear from you! 

This work is essential. While Open Education Week has ended, our efforts in support of open education march on as strong as ever.  We believe access to knowledge is a human right, and CC is working hard to ensure that open educational opportunities are available to all.

…