Lessons learnt from the collaborative creation and piloting of a course in Open Education for the South Mediterranean region

This paper presents and reflects upon the experience of the creation of the capacity building course "Open Education: fundamentals and approaches", produced within the OpenMed project with the support of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. The course aims to build capacity in Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER) among universities in the South-Mediterranean region. The course engages 70 university teachers from fifteen universities from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine, and is run through an active learning approach, in which learning activities are complemented by hands-on activities and by the production of a final project work, aimed at demonstrating how learners are able to apply the acquired knowledge in their daily teaching activities. Further, the course is run through Local Learning Circles, wherein, groups of teachers engage with the online course materials and activities, and discuss their response and ideas or issues, with a facilitator, established in all the participating universities, supported by experts in the course themes. Finally, the course is grounded in Fink's model (2003), based on a taxonomy which goes beyond rote learning, or straightforward application of skills, towards the development of more creative, engaging and reflective learning experiences as both process and outcome. The course, which represents one of the first attempts to train university professors and PhD students in the field of open education in the Mediterranean region, has been designed, developed and tested in a fully collaborative way among higher education institutions from Europe and the South-Mediterranean region, representing a genuine experience of multicultural open education development, where concepts, approaches and methodologies have resulted from discussions and negotiations among experts with different national, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Finally, the course is being researched to capture participants' experiences as they work through their learning journey. The facilitators' perspectives are also being sought, taking into account the opportunity to conduct comparative study of the different Learning Circles across regions.