Developing Supportive Policies and Strategies for Their Implementation: Student Experience with Real-World Cases

Abstract

One of the principal recommendations of the UNESCO OER Recommendation (2019) is the development of supportive policies, including regulatory frameworks and strategies. In this chapter, we describe a novel approach to the development of such policies and strategies for their implementation. The process involves using two resources: the UNESCO Guidelines for OER Policy as a framework and the Open Education Policy Game as a method for eliciting gaps and defining priorities in open policy and strategy design. Both instruments have shown to be a powerful mechanism to analyse and create a road map for OER and open education policy for organisations and groups. We will describe this methodology, developed and implemented as part of the Leadership in Open Education Master's course entitled Open Education Strategies. We begin with an overall perspective on the importance of developing leadership in open education by describing the Master's programme, its conception and its objectives. We highlight the importance of policy to promote the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Education (OE) more broadly. We then present the course rationale, followed by a description of the open practices and tools used to support a group of 10 students as they engaged in real-world open policy design.