Celebrating Excellence in Open Education – Introducing the 2023 Winners of the Open Education Awards for Excellence

Open Education Global (OEGlobal) is thrilled to announce the 2023 winners of the prestigious Open Education Awards for Excellence.

CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, October 5, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Open Education Global (OEGlobal) is thrilled to announce the 2023 winners of the prestigious Open Education Awards for Excellence. Each year, the awards recognize and celebrate outstanding achievements in open education.

This year, the awards team received nominations listing over 170 open education people and projects from 38 countries. The 20-member committee, consisting of previous award winners and the OEGlobal Board of Directors, reviewed each nomination. In early September, we released the shortlist of close contenders. On September 13, a global session of the OEG Live webcast announced the 18 winners of the 2023 Awards.

Open Education is a human movement that is only possible due to the work and passion of extraordinary people. The 2023 People of Open to receive individual awards are:
– The Catalyst Award goes to Jennryn Wetzler at Creative Commons, USA,
– The Leadership Award goes to Patrina Law at the Open University, United Kingdom,
– The Open Educator Award goes to Maha Bali at The American University in Cairo, Egypt,
– A shared Student Award goes to Matthew Barkovich, Henry Agnew, and Ethan Turner at LibreTexts and
– A second Student Award goes to Yasser Tamer Atef at The American University in Cairo, Egypt.

Open Assets are materials (usually digital) with educational purpose and value that open education initiatives produce, curate, and distribute in ways that make them freely accessible, usable, and improvable by others. The 2023 Open Assets Award winners are:
– The Open Curation / Repository Award goes to Storyweaver, where Pratham Books provides thousands of story books to address literacy needs where needed the most, in over 300 languages,
– The Open Infrastructure award goes to Openverse, a search tool supported by the WordPress Foundation of over 700 million open-licensed images and audio from multiple sources,
– The Open Reuse / Remix / Adaption Award goes to HUM 1: Modern Humanities on Manifold, an open textbook on Modern art and culture published by Kingsborough Community College, USA, and
– The Significant Impact OER Award goes to a multifunctional resource addressing an often misunderstood social challenge- Understanding Homelessness in Canada: From the Street to the Classroom, created by Trent University and experts with lived and field experience from the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, Canada.

Open Practices celebrate collective behaviors and techniques that open up access to educational opportunities. The 2023 Open Practices Award winners are:
– The Open Collaboration Award goes to The National Teaching Repository, organized by a network of practitioners to promote sharing and academic recognition in the United Kingdom,
– The Open Pedagogy Award goes to Buds, Branches, and Bark: A Guide to Winter Identification in the Pacific Northwest, an open textbook developed by Julia Alards-Tomalin and over 200 students at British Columbia Institute of Technology Pennsylvania State University, Canada,
– The Open Policy Award goes to Washington OER and Low-Cost Labeling Policies spearheaded and enacted by 34 members of the Washington Community and Technical College System, with significant leadership from the system’s student leadership organization, USA, and
– The Open Research Award goes to the Special Issue of the Journal for Multicultural Education, edited by Stacy Katz and Jennifer Van Allen at Lehman College, USA.

The core categories of the OE Awards (open individuals, open resources, and open practices) remain the same every year. Yet open education is constantly innovating and changing. OE Global recognizes these new trends and emerging innovations in its Special Awards category that change with the times. The winners of the 2023 Special Awards are:
– The Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award goes to Enhancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) in Open Educational Resources (OER), created by Nikki Andersen, Southern Queensland University, Australia, to provide authors and librarians with practical strategies for producing diverse, inclusive and accessible OER and open textbooks, and
– The Open Resilience Award goes to Responsive OER for Ukrainians, developed by OpenLearn, United Kingdom, to provide critical resources and support for Ukrainian refugees displaced by the Russian Invasion.
– The WildCard Award goes to the “We Like Sharing” Open Photo Competition organised by TU Delft that has taken place every OEWeek since 2021.

Congratulations to all the winners!

About the Open Education Awards for Excellence (awards.oeglobal.org)
OE Global hosts the Open Education Awards for Excellence each year to recognize distinctive open education sites, technological innovations, notable open courses, and exemplary leaders in Open Education worldwide. The awards have been held annually since 2011, with the 2023 edition marking the 12th anniversary.

Isla Haddow-Flood
OE Global
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+27 76 077 3135

Announcing the Winners of the Open Education Awards for Excellence 2023