Open Education
Open education is an umbrella term for in-school and extracurricular initiatives that promote participatory education and adapt educational concepts to the digital era. These initiates see education as a common good and place special focus on self-directed and competence-based learning.
Open education promotes:
- Digital literacy
- the development of new forms of social and civic engagement using digital tools, e.g. through digital volunteering
- the ethical use of information and communication technologies (see: Hacker Ethics)
Participatory learning scenarios and open educational resources help promote these goals. Such methods break the teacher-student paradigm and establish the two roles as equal partners who collaboratively develop learning content. The decentralised creation as well as free distribution of these materials is an important prerequisite for this.
Digital literacy
Digital literacy describes the ability to deal constructively, critically, and confidently with digital environments. Only with digital literacy and political engagement from civil society can we question and shape our increasingly digitised society. An understanding of digital technologies, e.g. how to exercise civil rights and duties online, is in this context not an end in itself, but a means to enable social participation.