Last week the COCo Team had the great opportunity to participate at Open Education Global (12th to 14th of April in Kraków, Poland) one more time.

Besides meeting old friends 😉 we discussed around such subjects as openness, best practices and new skills that could (should?) be taught at schools.

We organized the [Action Lab] Teaching coding and computer science: a test case for OER? on Thursday.

The topic: teaching coding and computer science is becoming an important issue in many countries, as a new subject that kids should have in the curriculum. Between the national initiatives emerging, some rely on Open Educational Resources (OER) and some on public/private partnerships (some on both). The goal of the session was to cross-examine the experiences from different countries, to answer the question of the specific relation between teaching coding and computer science and OERs as well as to provide the community with an analysis of the situation.

After an introduction by Colin de la Higuera (at distance), Davor Orlic, talked about Opening up Slovenia and Knowledge for All and raised some good questions from the audience. Next, Tiziana Margaria from Lero presented large-scale initiatives held in Ireland. Barry D. Floyd, from Cal Poly USA and founder of MERLOT, focused on academic/industry alliances. Camila presented COCo results and Class’Code, both projects taking place in France and using/producing OER. All supports used are available at the conference website.

We appreciated the interesting presentations as well as the enriching discussions with the audience and we thank you all for your participation!

See you next year?

By Ziarno (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 pl (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/pl/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons