Educators within Higher Education (HE) and K-12 share in the need for high quality educational resources to assist in the pursuit of teaching and learning. Although there are numerous differences between the two levels of education, there are commonalties in the perceptions of the purpose, practical uses, and challenges that abide in the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). Observations made while producing podcasts and videos for OER awareness, use, and championing, form an exposition of the merits of OER for HE and K-12. Benefits include cost-savings in acquiring resources for teaching and learning as well as usergenerated content, instructor creativity, and contextualized and responsively timely learning opportunities.Additionally, the teaching culture of K-12 has historically supported the sharing of learning activities and learning resources. At all levels of education, OER awareness requires a deeper understanding of the changes to teaching and learning borne by open educational practices.

This article explores how the use of participatory visual methods can enhance and promote a mind-set of elicitation for researchers throughout the research process. By exploring five case studies that used images at varying stages, the authors analyzed these cases exploring how the use of images demonstrates a valuable mind-set of elicitation at every stage of the research process. This article explores how the use of participatory visual methods and an elicitation mind-set can, by way of summary, promote recruitment, enhance deeper data collection, further engagement by community members in research, and support richer knowledge intermediation back to a community. This article explores how the nature of images used in research in smaller Prairie-based or rural and Northern communities did, through the use of visual and participatory methodologies, expand the success, impact, and reach of elicitation in research.

Awareness and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) has grown at all levels of education. Higher education researchers actively study OER but K-12 OER research indicates limited published results. To address this gap, this study examined articles meeting defined criteria and analyzed the results. Findings include cohesion of author-supplied keywords and ten primary categories of focus. From 38 articles studied, a variety of research methods were represented. Analysis showed Professional and Applied Sciences were overwhelmingly represented with the majority of articles within the discipline of Education and its fields with Humanities a distant second category of publication. The equal distribution between open and closed access journals may reflect changes to past scholarly publication practices. Citation analysis revealed divergences and reinforces the nascent quality of this topic. Future K-12 OER research that studies the complex change from resource scarcity to resource flexibility and digital abundance is needed.

In this article, ambassadors of the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) Open Educational Resources (OER) Advocacy Committee (OERAC) provide a snapshot of regional and global Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives. This committee has been active since 2017 with membership renewed biannually. The ambassadors work to further OER awareness and understanding, to increase global recognition of OER, and provide policy support for the acceptance and application of OER. This overview highlights national and regional initiatives associated with the UNESCO OER recommendation and the five action areas that include: building capacity and leveraging OER; developing supporting policies; ensuring equity and effectiveness; encouraging sustainable OER model development; and, promoting and facilitating international collaboration. In addition, monitoring and evaluation of the action areas are suggested to be prioritized. This overview is not exhaustive, and much work remains to implement the OER Recommendation at scale, maximize its implementation, connect these recommendations to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), along with the futures of education with a new social contract for education, individuals, and the planet.

Through the examination of two cases developed in a fully virtual environment, we illustrate and uncover the role and value of open educational pedagogy and practices as part of building educational resilience. The first project, Form and Function, wove together for teachers of secondary students, an interdisciplinary OER animation and learning activities as part of developing computational thinking. Following from this work, the Accelerating Vaccine Confidence project produced a science and digital literacy OER animation including open learning assets embracing student stakeholder voices. Throughout the co-creation of these curricular assets, the projects had collaborative design teams ranging from university professors and graduate students in the first case to high school students, their teachers and community members in the second. Hegarty’s (2015) attributes of open pedagogy frames and informs both projects and allows for a structured analysis of the processes and choices made. Participatory technologies formed a keystone of both projects and contribute toward the processes of educational resilience. The two cases highlight how interweaving open education with technology as a set of values and a mindset contributes toward educational innovative and resiliency. //