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ASEM Expert Group Digitalisation 2022

As part of the ASEM Expert Group Digitalisation 2022 meeting on Friday, December 16, 2022, we gave a talk on Open Education Hub, our vision, goals and work so far.

The ASEM Expert Group Digitalisation meets twice a year to discuss and layout the cooperation between Europe and Asia regarding education, technology and digitalisation. Open Education Hub fits well into the agenda and were happy to give a talk and present our work as part of the OpenEdu Project (21-COP-0016), funded by EEA Grants: Using the Open Source Collaborative Model for the Development, Delivery and Curation of Digital Educational Content.

The talk focuses on Open Education Hub's mission of using technology to improve all aspects of teaching and learning.

We contrast the current load of teachers and teaching, filled with administrative and tedious, repetitive tasks, with the ideal environment where teaching (and learning) should be a fun, engaging, human-centered, personalized experience. Logistics, management, evaluation and content should be, as much as possible, already in place.

Technology (computing, Internet, devices) provides the means to get many mundane, repetitive things out of the way and to improve teaching / learning via automation and via global connection (for contributions and collaboration). Moreover, technology provides accessibility and fairness to (high quality educational) content to those who request / need it.

We present our work so far and the tools and techniques we adapted from the open source world: Markdown format, GitHub, reveal-md, Docker, GitLab, CI/CD, scripting & automation.

We summarize the challenges we are currently facing, regarding the effort to generate and convert content, making it easy to configure for personal, integration with existing tools and having the manpower to maintain a large set of repositories.

The talk was well received, with a question whether it is targeted only for universities. OpenEdu is focused on education on all levels; it provides the methodology, infrastructure and content for teachers and learners alike to deliver and consume educational resources. Another question considered the effort in having maintainers for different content repositories; we replied that this is a challenge of the project, and we will have to find solutions to assign maintainers for Open Education Hub repositories.