The Open Education Global Conference is the largest global conference for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and educators that explores open education and its impact on education worldwide.

Last week, Frontiers for Young Minds participated in the five-day online OE Global Conference, which focused on the connection of open education to the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation. The Conference saw over 2,000 participants from 80 countries. The 290+ sessions addressed all five of the Recommendation action areas including building capacity, open education policy, ensuring inclusive and equitable access to OER, sustainability, and international cooperation. The participants were able to enjoy the multi-lingual aspect of the conference with sessions taking place in English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese.

"We were honoured to convene the global open education community at our 2021 conference to discuss the latest developments, emerging trends and best practices. As a global event, this conference reveals the diverse and culturally specific ways open education is being put into practice around the world,” commented Paul Stacey, executive director at Open Education Global.

Laura Henderson, head of public outreach program at Frontiers, delivered engaging sessions on open pedagogy and how young people get involved as peer reviewers and moderators of scientific work. Frontiers for Young Minds was praised for modelling such a unique, inclusive and co-creative process for open pedagogy. Laura also reiterated Frontiers’ wider access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education through open access.

“The OEGlobal team did a great job of engaging all participants and I really appreciated their presence at our sessions and their online comments. In our live discussions, we had great interest and enthusiasm for the Frontiers for Young Minds project and I was delighted to connect with people who are keen to promote open resources and education,” Laura Henderson summarized.

Frontiers for Young Minds will now start to prepare for the OE Global 2022 conference which will continue to focus on the UNESCO Recommendation through an in-person congress taking place in France, in May 2022.

Frontiers is a signatory to the United Nations Publishers COMPACT. The above initiative supports United Nations Sustainable Goal 4: Quality Education.