Every year the Open Education Awards for Excellence recognizes outstanding contributions in the Open Education community, recognizing exemplary individuals, distinctive Open Educational Resources, and innovative Open Practices from around the world.
To widen the scope of recognition, in 2023 we are first announcing this OEAwards shortlist of finalists that celebrates 14 individuals and 34 open education initiatives and practices across the 16 awards categories.
The shortlist was selected from 172 nominations of open education excellence representing 38 countries in a process conducted by the 20 members of the OE Awards 2023 Committee and the OEGlobal Board Members.
Explore the finalists listed below for each award category and look to add messages of encouragement and gratitude in OEG Connect.
People in Open
Catalyst Award
Abbey Elder
Iowa State University, United States
Abbey Elder has broadened access to the Open conversation by sharing resources with a focus on helping faculty and staff, who are new to Open Education, explore the field with confidence.
Kathy Essmiller
Oklahoma State University, United States
As the coordinator of OpenOKState, Kathy works with the Library to support collaboration and innovation among faculty, instructors, administrators, and students working to increase access to meaningful research, teaching and learning resources and experiences.
Jonathan Poritz
Independent, Italy
Jonathan Poritz has been lighting the spark of open education throughout his career, a tenured professor, OE coordinator, facilitator of the Creative Commons Certificate, and now as an independent consultant in the Open Movement.
Jennryn Wetzler
Creative Commons, United States
As Director of Learning and Training at Creative Commons, Jennryn supports the ideals of the Open Education movement through her own practices and creates engagement in openness with a global community.
Educator Award
Maha Bali
The American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt
Maha’s work on open pedagogy and practices is an important contribution to the field and she brings an important diversity, equity and inclusion voice to open education.
James Brunton
Dublin City University, Ireland
James is a leading Irish scholar and practitioner in the area of Open Education Practice. He uses Open Educational Practices (OEP) in his teaching and research practice and is an advocate in his programme, institution, nationally and internationally.
Student Award
Henry Agnew, Ethan Turner, and Matthew Barkovich
LibreTexts, United States
LibreTexts is nominating a team of three undergraduates who as successive generations of student developers on the project were critical in creating the award winning technology that makes LibreTexts work.
Yasser Tamer Atef
The American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt
At only 21 Yasser Tammer is a strong disability advocate and researcher with a deep interest in exploring the interplay between disability and accessibility. He participates in Twitter conversations related to disability in a way that “calls people in not calling them out.”
Leadership Award
Catherine Cronin
Independent, Ireland
An independent scholar focused on critical and social justice approaches to open, digital, and higher education. Catherine has played a significant role at the intersection of online learning and open education researching and providing guidelines on policy and practice, but perhaps most importantly on the conceptual understandings of what open education is.
Patrina Law
The Open University, United Kingdom
Under Patrina’s leadership, the global reach of Open Educational Resources through OpenLearn is now considered by many to be the jewel in the crown of Europe’s largest distance learning university.
Lisa Petrides
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, United States
Lisa Petrides’ connection of knowledge management to education is a singular act of human genius– to envision a new academic discipline that also overlaps with a related set of public policies, none of which existed at the time she created ISKME.
Martin Weller
The Open University, United Kingdom
Martin’s leadership and championing of open education is second to none in terms of influence at The Open University. His thoughtful and pragmatic approach has directly influenced practice in hundreds of institutions that take inspiration from The Open University.
What We Share
Open Curation / Repository
Mada ICT-AID OER Hub
Qatar Assistive Technology Center Mada, Qatar
The Mada ICT-AID open competency framework and OER Hub expands capabilities in the realm of digital accessibility toward empowering students with disabilities and fostering open and inclusive digital education.
Proyecto EDIA
CEDEC – INTEF, Spain
CEDEC promotes actions and strategies to further develop the design, use, adaptation and general uptake of open educational resources through the EDIA Project, including the creation and testing of OER and related tools, professional training about OER, active education methodologies and free software.
Storyweaver
Pratham Books, India
Publisher Pratham Books offers through Storyweaver a digital repository of thousands of multilingual story books addressing the needs of disadvantaged children globally, especially where gaps in local language reading resources is a significant barrier to literacy.
VCCS Transfer Course Mapping Hub
VIVA Open, United States
This hub includes OER selected by librarians across the state of Virginia to be aligned with Virginia Community College System transfer courses.
Open Infrastructure
convOERter
RWTH Aachen University, Germany
The comvOERter assists teachers by simplifying the OER creation process. The tool supports common presentation and document formats as input, detects embedded images that can be replaced with openly licensed images, and automatically sets the correct license.
Openverse
WordPress Foundation, United States
The successor to the original Creative Commons Search, Openverse currently indexes over 700 million CC licensed image and media items. It aggregates results from multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
Open Reuse / Remix / Adaptation
《少年的自我療傷—甘耀明《殺鬼》少年圖書改編》客家語多媒體教材
National Chia Tung University, Taiwan
Using Pressbooks, Kuang-Chih Hsu, built an Open Textbook for “Self-Healing of a Teenager: a Picture Book Adapted from Ghost Slayer by Gan Yaoming.” This book remixed content from open resources to bring to life Chang Wan-Ju’s unpublished picture book.
Français inclusif
Boise State University, United States
Created by a K-16 team, Français Inclusif provides a complete curriculum for first-year and second-year French. The team not only revised and remixed existing OER text, but also created significant ancillary materials including assessments, task-based activities, cultural reflections, slide decks, and embedded authentic materials.
HUM 1: Modern Humanities on Manifold
Kingsborough Community College, United States
This comprehensive multimedia Humanities textbook published openly in the Manifold platform provides the key support for the College Now program where high school students earn both college credit who lack access to necessary course resources.
LIDA103fr
UNESCO, ICDE, OERu,L’Université Numérique, Université Cheikh Hamidou Kane– Multinational
LIDA103fr is the French adaptation of the OERu’s open course “Open Education, Copyright, and Open Licensing in a Digital World” created to support capacity development in OER for Francophone countries. The adaption included both translation and cultural validation and is currently being adapted at Université Cheikh Hamidou Kane (Senegal).
Significant Impact OER
American Government Audiobook
LA Harbor College, United States
Brian Barrick and student Sarah Arya collaboratively recorded an audio version of OpenStax American Government 3e making it more accessible for commuters, visually impaired, and English Language learners. The site includes additional instructor resources.
Futurum Careers’ Educational Resources
Futurum Careers, United Kingdom
Researchers share here STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and Medicine) and SHAPE (Social sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy/Environment), resources that help them communicate their research in an accessible and engaging way to a global audience of teenagers.
Understanding Homelessness in Canada: From the Street to the Classroom
Multiple Organizations, Canada
This open textbook engages learners in critical discussions about real world social issues alongside leading researchers in the field and people with lived experience.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA)
Multiple Organizations, Canada
Designed to address accessibility requirements, this guide was created to also inspire people to go beyond the minimum and consider Universal Design for Learning in making higher education more accessible and inclusive. It also includes a consideration of UDL through the lens of Indigenous peoples and pedagogies.
How We Share
Open Collaboration
Exercise and Physical Activity in Indigenous Health
Multiple Organizations, Canada
Exercise and Physical Activity in Indigenous Health helps learners to develop a cultural awareness of Indigenous health and has served as an example of a decolonializing pedagogical approaches to both collaboration and learning.
The National Teaching Repository
Multiple Organizations, United Kingdom
An online searchable database designed to foster the collective production and sharing of open resources, with a shared goal to support the continual improvement of learning and teaching.
STEAM OER LATAM community
Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico
The STEAM OER LATAM community aims to promote, strengthen and disseminate STEAM education through STEAM territories, the movement of open educational resources and open educational practices in Latin America.
Regional Leaders of Open Education Network (RLOE)
CCCOER/OE Global, United States
RLOE supported over 100 participants to design and begin to implement open education strategic plans at their institutions that included initiatives in professional development, forming partnerships, integrating DEI principles and more.
Open Pedagogy
Buds, Branches and Bark: A Guide to Winter Identification in the Pacific Northwest
British Columbia Institute of Technology, Canada
Professor Julia Alards-Tomalin lead a project that involved over 200 BCIT students across 3 schools who contributed to the development this engaging openly licensed guide to plant and wildlife identification.
Competendo Digital Toolbox
DARE Democracy and Human Rights Education in Europe, Germany
Competendo is a free and open toolbox for democracy learning, digitalisation and non-formal education that promotes democracy-related and competence-centered learning.
Open for Antiracism Program
CCCOER, United States
This program was developed to respond to growing awareness of structural racism in higher education and centered on the application of open pedagogy and OER as tools to help faculty change their way of teaching.
Open for Inclusive Excellence
Northern Virginia Community College, United States
This professional development program advances the intersection of Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Pedagogy (OP), and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) to support faculty in becoming more culturally responsive and inclusive of the learning.
Open Policy
Washington OER and Low-Cost Labeling Policies
Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, United States
Through student-led policy establishment, data-driven consensus building, effective implementation, and evaluation, these policies demonstrate a comprehensive and strategic approach to improving equitable access, affordability, and educational quality for students.
Open Research
Annual Top 10 “Good Reads” in Open Access Journals in Digital Education
Dublin City University, Ireland
Focuses on the diverse nature of open research in digital education and helps promote open scholarship and research dissemination through open-access publications.
OpenResearchLab
Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico
An open virtual laboratory using advanced technologies to help educators develop integrative thinking and scale up research competences, academic literacy and reasoning for complexity, through channels of openness in research and dissemination processes.
Special Issue of the Journal for Multicultural Education
Lehman College, United States
The special issue focuses on pedagogical considerations and practical applications of equitable OEP, specifically on the practical elements and research on implementing OEP for social justice and equity.
Special Awards
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology)
College of Marin, United States
A structural racism guidebook that informs readers about how structural racism played a role in 43 higher education discipline areas to help instructors incorporating this untold history into their teaching practices.
Enhancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) in Open Educational Resources (OER)
University of Southern Queensland, Australia
A framework and practical suggestions for enhancing inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility (IDEA) in OER, developed for authors and librarians to apply practical strategies for producing diverse, inclusive and accessible OER and open textbooks.
GO-GN EDI Guidelines: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Open Education with a focus on Africa and Latin America
GO-GN, United Kingdom
A research effort to explore EDI in Open Education (OE) in regions that are often marginalized from the main discourse. While there are developments in OE in Africa and Latin America, it is a region where voices are still not fully heard or recognized.
Maamwi Hub
Multiple Organizations, Canada
Developed with the Indigenous Peoples Education Circle, representing Indigenous education at all 24 colleges in Ontario. The Maamwi Hub is Ontario’s access point for open, credible educational resources on Indigenous history, culture, knowledge and current worldviews.
Open Resilience
Academic Development Open Virtual Hub (ADOVH)
University of South Africa (UNISA), South Africa
The hub was created to develop students’ digital competencies and create inclusive and equitable opportunities to succeed in the transition from print-based teaching materials, face-to-face tutorial support, and venue-based examinations to a fully technology-mediated learning experience.
Responsive OER for Ukrainians
OpenLearn, United Kingdom
OpenLearn has both translated into Ukrainian their key learning materials and developed new courses and resources aimed at serving the refugee population in the UK and the people accessing content remotely from Ukraine. OpenLearn has supported more than 5,000 people with these translated resources, and they have been well received by those supporting Ukrainian refugees.
Wildcard
“Is this an OER?” Addressing the Complex Relationship between Open and Affordable Course Materials
University of Wyoming, United States
A valuable guide on what is and is not open educational resources and most importantly, why this distinction matters. With four informative sections, as well as additional handouts and resources, the creators provide a “one-stop shop” for boosting knowledge and confidence in this topic, from learning how to identify an open educational resource to advocating for OER initiatives at your own campus.
“We Like Sharing” Open Photo Competition
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Conducted each year during Open Education Week, ‘We Like Sharing’ fosters this feeling through a photo bank of highly recyclable, multiple-use images created by TU Delft staff, students, alumni, their friends and families aligning with a yearly theme. All these images are openly licensed and available for reuse.