ENOEL: The Introduction of a European Open Education Group

ECIL and ENOEL are two groups that have a lot in common. Both strive to bring together the librarians of Europe for a bigger goal. Their topics differ slightly, but the groups definitely have similarities. Whereas ECIL unites information specialists from all over Europe to exchange ideas, best practices, and research on all aspects of information literacy, ENOEL does the same job on all aspects of open education (OE).ENOEL started around three years ago as a part of SPARC Europe and since then ENOEL members have been working on a lot of projects. ENOEL consists of more than 100 very enthusiastic librarians from 27 countries all over Europe. We meet (virtually) around ten times a year.

The projects we have been working on are the following:

  • OE Champions: a series of 13 interviews with inspirational advocates of OE in Europe.
  • The ENOEL toolkit: a toolkit that consists of reusable and adaptable templates for Twitter cards, slides, and leaflets. Its aim is to help raise awareness of the importance of OE and explain benefits for four stakeholder groups: students, teachers, institutions, and society at large. ENOEL members have translated the Toolkit into 16 languages so far.
  • Resources for librarians & OE enthusiasts: a Wakelet page that is filled by members of the ENOEL community with links to key documents that can support librarians and OE advocates.
  • A “ENOEL practitioners under the spotlight” webinar series: In this series of webinars, ENOEL members guide us through their personal journeys with OEproviding a space for network members to share ideas, ask questions, and learn from one another.
  • OE “Drops”: A series of short videos explaining the basics of OE to newcomers.
  • OE learning path for librarians: a helpful guide for librarians who want to learn more about OE and identify available resources for educators, researchers, and students.
  • A survey on OE in European libraries of higher education.

We partner with national and international networks to stimulate the implementation of the Open Education Agenda, including Creative Commons, ICDE, LIBER, OE Global, SPARC NA, the Network of Open Orgs, and many others. We try to visit as many conferences as we can to spread the word about our activities and learn from other communities and organize virtual OE café sessions with our OE Champions on different themes. The last one we did was on OE policy. The work of the ENOEL membership has paid off: last year we won the worldwide OE Award for Open Collaboration.

But we want to do more and that’s why we invite you to become a member of our community: the more we grow, the more we can do to support the OE movement.

Monique Schoutsen
Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

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