The Future of Education

Due to the limited number of speakers of less used languages, including regional and minority languages, by comparison with the number of speakers of “bigger” languages, the capacity to produce Open Educational Resources (OER), further develop them and embrace them in Open Educational Practice (OEP) is not the same. At the same time, adoption of OER/OEP is much more pressing for less used languages which have (very) limited digital presence, threatening linguistic and cultural diversity on a global scale.

This presentation discusses ways less used languages can benefit from community-driven initiatives to enhance OER uptake. A selection of practices and initiatives will be presented, to emphasize the role of bottom-up, community driven engagement as a catalyst of OER uptake.

In the first part of the presentation we showcase crowdsourcing and localization practices carried out by communities of less used languages, such as those hosted by Amara and Khan Akademy. We also identify state initiatives in less used languages that are built on the network based, community engagement of native speakers

This activity is part of the European commission co-funded project LangOER that aims to enhance teaching and learning of less-used languages (including Regional and Minority Languages-RML) through Open Educational Resources (OER) and Practices (OEP). The project http://langoer.eun.org/