A survey on OER for Makerspaces
- May 19, 2023
- 3 min read
Are you a maker or makerspace? Do you know any Open Educational Resources (OER) related to makerspaces, fablabs or any other kind of DIH? We invite you to fill out this survey, to help the mAkE project with your precious and valuable answers!
About the mAkE project
The mAkE project is a transdisciplinary approach to connect European and African Digital Innovation Hubs to maximize their potential as spaces for digital innovation, skill building, job creation and contact points for global collaboration networks. Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the mAkE project aims to strengthen the EU-Africa innovation ecosystem by creating the necessary infrastructure for decentral production and collaboration as well as shared policy frameworks and educational opportunities. mAkE is focused on connecting makerspaces in both Europe and Africa, in particular in regard to digital, local manufacturing and innovation in product design and development. To achieve this mission, the mAkE project is organized along 9 Work packages (WP) :
A focus on WP3: Open Education, Skill Development and Capacity Building
The WP3 aims to establish a joint learning space for African and European DIH networks by creating and sharing learning materials in the form of open educational resources in a dedicated e-learning environment. The objective being to enable the capacity development of makerspaces themselves; thereby improve and sustainably establish the services they offer to their entrepreneurial members, local SMEs, startups and individual makerspace members, in creating sustainable, impact-oriented digital innovations.
The WP3 is led by APSOHA (Association Pour La Promotion de la Science ouverte en Haïti et Afrique), which is committed to deliver an Open Makerspace Toolkit with open educational resources, build a Massive Open Online Course platform: the Make-MOOC, lead the training of trainers and ensure the contents of the materials are available to a francophone and anglophone audience. The impact we anticipate through these deliverables is broad. Indeed, dedicated courses and training on business development, specific technologies and methodologies will address the learning and capacity building needs of the hubs, makers and innovators. Building the hubs’ capacity will enable them to be more effective in supporting their members to turn innovation into business ventures, to work with emerging technologies and to help job creation. Synergies between hubs in Europe and in Africa will be found by creating shared learning environments and knowledge exchange tools such as mentoring sessions and joint experiments.
Why the survey to identify OER for Makerspaces?
According to UNESCO, open educational resources (OER) are “learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others”. As you will have noticed, OER are an important part of the success of this WP3. Hence the need to collect as many existing OER on Makerspaces as possible. So, if you know of any OER related to makerspaces, please:
Your answers will help us develop the Open Makerspace Toolkit, containing relevant existing open educational resources (OER) on how to set up, manage, equip and sustain different types of open, collaborative and innovative makerspaces and other kinds of DIHs.
