Open Education Italy - Schools
Teaser
Italy is not known all around the world for being an example of clearness and order. On the other hand, our boot-shaped country is appreciated for the high level of creativity and innovation in history. In the education field, we can somehow confirm these statements: I’ve conducted a short-time research for Sero Consulting, a British company that leads the POERUP project, that is aimed to develop policy recommendations to promote the uptake of OER (Open Educational Resources) in the educational sector, and to further the range of purposes for which institutions deploy OER.
The project includes researches in “opening up education, widening access (internationally and in particular for developing countries), higher quality or lower cost of teaching – and combinations of these.“
One of the most general findings was that so far there’s much more for schools especially in terms of policies at a government and regional level than for universities. The reason is probably that in Italy education is, so far and happily, still funded with public budget, especially for schools. We have private schools but most are still public. At the higher education level there are more private universities that are somehow in competition with each others and with public ones. That’s why we’ll find more policies to support open education and more bottom up initiatives in schools. This article will focus more on this aspect, while in a following one we’ll talk about the university level.
Please check the full article on the Open Education Working Group here: http://education.okfn.org/open-education-italy
