The EduCoop – Open Education Cooperative is the result of a wide view of openness in education. It grew from a strong belief that openness means cooperation, process, diversity, readiness for change, trust, courage and a willingness to experience something new.

The Cooperative’s focus is on a cooperation model for creating high-quality open educational resources (OER). We want to improve the competences of the project’s participants when it comes to using digital tools in education, and increase their knowledge of copyrights, Creative Commons and free licenses.

During last year’s pilot edition, we have worked with math teachers. This year we have concentrated on key teachers. The decision was made after many discussions with teachers of different subjects. They all stressed that lack of materials for home room is a huge problem, and as a result, those special hours when teachers could concentrate on solving pupils’ important problems are often “wasted” for giving grades or useless chatter.

We invited 14 teachers to participate in the project. They had absolute freedom when it came to the topics they covered or how they worked. There were only two principles: the materials were to be made in groups and become open educational resources. During four meetings and additional remote collaboration they fine-tuned their topic and got to know design methods and technical solutions, all while learning about novelties from the education world.

As a result, participant created four open educational resources. They cover such topics as art therapy, co-creation of school space, verbal and non-verbal communication. All materials will be soon published on our website.