IGF 2018 WS #145
Online Educational Resources: beyond technological challenge

Issue(s)

Organizer 1: Mikhail Komarov, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Organizer 2: Ines Hfaiedh, Tunisian Ministry of National Education / The Arab World Internet Institute
Organizer 3: Sarah Kiden, Mozilla Foundation (Hosted by Research ICT Africa)

Speaker 1: Antoine Vergne, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 2: Aicha Jeridi, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 3: Wolfgang Kleinwächter, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 4: Mikhail Komarov, Civil Society, Eastern European Group
Speaker 5: Andrey Shcherbovich, Civil Society, Eastern European Group
Speaker 6: Witaba Bonface, Civil Society, African Group

Moderator

Dr . Svetlana Maltseva, HSE

Online Moderator

Dr. Sergey Efremov, HSE

Rapporteur

Dr. Andrey Shcherbovich, HSE

Format

Panel - 90 Min

Interventions

There will be representatives from all the stakeholder groups from all the regions in order to have multistakeholder approach. Speakers at the panel have experience in the area of online educational content, expertise about internet policies in different countries, emerging issues.
There is a number of questions that will be addressed to participants representing different stakeholder groups.
1. Which educational facilities of the Internet could be posed in threat due to governmental filtering and/or fragmentation?
2. How can governmental fragmentation impose threats to the open educational resources?
3. How are these threats recognized by different stakeholder groups in different countries?
4. What is the economic and social effect of the governmental restrictions of the education resources?
5. Which legal and organizational measures could be taken to keep OERs safe from fragmentation?

Diversity

There will be representatives of the almost all regional groups (WEOG, African Group, Eastern European), male and female genders, and different stakeholder groups (Civil Society, Academia, Private Sector) to ensure true balanced discussion on the workshop. As experienced from our previous workshops, this will show a wide range of the presented viewpoints.

Today there is a fast increase in numbers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), open data and educational content (Open Educational Resources (OERs)) on the Internet and the process is getting even faster with emerging technologies: mobile, virtual and augmented reality etc. More and more educational programs depend on Internet resources. And online education services now are major approaches for empowering people. Access to such a large and unregulated body of information, as exists on the Internet, suggests a need for content quality ranking and critical evaluation of related educational Internet resources as the information there might be both not relevant, not up to date and not scientific.
Due to the use of cloud services, one company/organization might use cloud services which might be found illegal in the country and the whole cloud service will be blocked which would lead to the blockage at the same time other resources using that cloud service - including educational resources/services. That is why there is the question how to protect educational resources using cloud services from the blocking (fragmentation) - shall we ask cloud service providers to introduce separate IP-address for the cloud which is used for educational purposes so that it will avoid blockage?
We faced situation when Telegram was blocked in Russia and due to that efforts Google and Amazon cloud services were blocked and some of the Google services (even for education were not available) and some services which were using Amazon Cloud services were not also available.

There will be from 5 to 7 short presentations (5 minutes each), after that there will be session of Q&A from the remote participants, and after that there will be discussion with the audience on important points of the workshop (some topics will be collected before the workshop from the pre-registered remote participants). So, the whole process will be fully interactive between the speakers, remote participants and audience in the room. Speakers will participate at the discussion sharing their expertize. There also be organized remote hub as we organized it previously on the basis of National Research University Higher School of Economics.

This workshop will be a continuation of 4 workshops from previous IGFs: “Empowering displaced people and migrants through online services” (IGF 2013), “Empowerment displaced people through online educational services” (IGF 2014) and “OERs and empowerment through quality online content” which was held in 2015, and “Empowerment through Quality Online Education” which was held in 2016 at the IGF and was of a high interest by different stakeholders.
This topic has strong connection with Emerging technologies, Diversity, Sustainable development, Digital literacy and Human rights and access to the information and also has strong influence on both local people and people who arrived to the particular country if we are talking about national level of governance.

Online Participation

As we made previously we will connect a remote hub to the session. This hub based in Moscow, Higher School of Economics. Practice shows that this is interesting for other hubs in academic institutions worldwide. In addition, we reserve an option for speakers to participate online in remote mode in case some of them would be unable to be present onsite.