OpenMed: Opening up education in Arab-Mediterranean countries

This paper shares the intercultural learning to date from the OpenMed project, an Erasmus+ funded EuroMediterranean collaboration, aiming to facilitate the adoption of Open Educational Practices (OEP), with a particular emphasis on the use and production of Open Educational Resources (OER) at universities in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Palestine. Within the project, universities from across the two shores of the Mediterranean, representing different levels of maturity in the implementation of OEPs, are working together to foster new forms of international partnership and exchange across disciplines and faculties. The first phase of the project has involved the gathering and analyzing of international case studies representing initiatives in OEP with a focus on the South-Mediterranean (S-M) region, to generate a Compendium of reliable, evidence-based knowledge. This will inform the subsequent phases of the project and ultimately aim to facilitate the adoption of OEP at the partners in the S-M region, other universities in each of their respective countries and, more broadly, at other universities in the Arab World. Key findings from this first phase of the project have highlighted a spectrum of processes, procedures and technological choices in the range of case study examples developed. What is evident is a desire and willingness to embrace ‘openness’ and networking, yet the starting point around definitions of openness differ, as do practices around open licensing and acknowledgement of the pedagogy underpinning the open education initiatives.