Excellent news!
The project won the Fred Mulder award for Best Open Educational Practice.
The Fred Mulder award is granted by the Global OER Graduate Network (GO_GN), a network of international PhD candidates and scholars whose research projects include a focus on open education. It is led by the Open University in the UK and funded by the Hewlett Foundation. This particular award recognises those researchers and experts in the area of Open Education that have had a contribution to the field, which was the case for this project. The project’s aim was to design, develop and pilot an open educational resource for HE educators to foster critical data literacy.
The project was also showcased earlier this year in the international conference OEGlobal21 (Open Education Global) which was entirely dedicated to the implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation action areas -capacity building, policy, access, sustainability and international cooperation, making a contribution to the international cooperation Recommendation area. So we are very proud and grateful to all the institutions and brilliant people that contributed to this project making it possible.
What is the project about?
Understanding data: Praxis and Politics is a one year project funded by the EPSRC ( EP/R045178/1) and the HDI+ network. Here you can find a more detailed description of the grant.
We live in a datafied society where decisions taken by corporations and governments are increasingly data and algorithm-driven. Whilst data are often said to be ‘collected’ as if pre-existing, thus reflecting reality, the processes through which data are generated and communicated are neither neutral nor devoid of adverse effects. Richterich (2018) reminds us that data are socially constructed and embedded in their structures. Data are political. Therefore we need technical abilities and media literacies weaved into a critical approach to understand the socio-political and cultural mechanisms that affect individuals and groups that find themselves increasingly navigating data-driven system in their daily lives.
The project aims to design, develop and pilot an OER (open educational resource) to support educators in improving their critical data literacies. The OER will provide educators with content and analytical tools to think about real-life situations that will connect them with the most recent issues and research in the field.
The OER will be tried out in four strategic pilot institutions that kindly offered their facilities: Tangaza University College, Nairobi; Universidad de la República, Uruguay; Universidad Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona; and Bath Spa University, England. These pilots will allow us to explore what works and what doesn’t in our approach to refine/redesign the OER for a second iteration.
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Pilot institutions
