Projects in 2016

COPYRIGHT VS. EDUCATION

Copyright for education was for us, as one of the key members of the COMMUNIA association, a strategically important topic in 2016. COMMUNIA is one of very few organizations dealing with this issue tackled in the European Commission copyright reform proposal. Since mid-2016 we have been building a coalition of organizations and experts from the education sector, supporting the strengthening of the educational exception. Moreover, we were engaged in developing the concept for the campaign “Make Copyright Right for Education Right Now” and in the study on modern education practices and the impact of copyright on them.

As COMMUNIA we took part in the sessions of WIPO committee for copyright issues. Along with Creative Commons we participated in discussions on the educational exception. We see this as the beginning of advocacy activities on a global scale – we will return to WIPO in May 2017.
We became involved in copyright consultations conducted by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and we managed to build a coalition supporting our postulates which enable the exercise of the education exception not only by educators and schools, but also other entities carrying out educational activity, including museums, libraries and organizations.

OPEN EDUCATION

We actively supported the activities of the Coalition for Open Education (KOED). During the summer holidays in August we co-organized another edition of a
KOED members congress, which took place in Katowice and gathered around 40 representatives of member organizations. Our policy-related actions were also focused on re-creating a relationship with the new public administration. In the course of 2016 we managed to strengthen the relationship with the Ministry of Digitalization (important from the point of view of digital education) and established contacts with education ministry officers, responsible for digital education and innovations.
Simultaneously, we devoted a great deal of energy to expand our activity to the European arena. We invited over 60 activists, experts and officials from over 30 countries to the Open Educational Resources Policy Forum organized in April in Cracow. This is the only event of this kind devoted to the implementation of openness policies in education.

Starting from mid-year Alek Tarkowski was involved in the preparation of OER17 conference, planned for April 2017, as a co-chair, together with Josie Fraser from the UK. Finally, towards the end of the year we started creating a regional network supporting the policies of Open Educational Resources in our region (owing to the support from the Hewlett Foundation). At that time we also published “Global Open Policy Report”, developed by an international team composed of Open Policy Network members, headed by Alek Tarkowski. The aim of the report was to present the status of development of openness policies in 4 areas (education, science, data, heritage), in over 30 countries in the world. This is one of very few reports of that kind, presenting various types of openness policies together.

DIGITAL COMPETENCES

In 2016 we evaluated the project MegaMisja of Orange Foundation. Megamisja is an all-Polish education program addressed to community rooms operating in primary schools aimed at increasing digital competences of teachers and students aged 6-10. Teachers gain access to training resources from the feld of media education, while children are invited to enter the world of a game in which reaching subsequent stages of the tasks given teaches them how to use digital technologies consciously and safely. The project draws on the results of the study conducted in September 2015 in schools in all of Poland by the research team of Centrum Cyfrowe.
On commission of the Ministry of Development we also prepared and conducted three trainings for the Ministry employees concerning the application of Creative Commons licenses and open public resources. As commissioned by the Ministry of Digitalization, wedeveloped a standard regarding the optimal method and scope of conducting trainings and animation activities relating to digital competences addressed to the age group of 65+ in the framework of action 3.1 in the Operational Programme Digital Poland.