Feb 24th, 2022 changed the lives of thousands of librarians in Ukraine. On that morning, Russia launched a terrible large-scale war against Ukraine. Efforts are destroying the Ukrainian people as a nation, erasing its history, culture, science, and education.
Despite this, Ukrainian librarians are determined to continue supporting students and teachers: often in extreme conditions. They are taking the chance to implement Open Education (OE) solutions at a time when most at need.
It is still early days for OER in Ukraine. In recent years, the Ministry of Education and Science has prioritised engaging in more systematic work to bring Ukrainian academia closer to the European research and innovation community. Select open practices exist in some institutions; however, OE and OER are not yet mentioned in official national documents.
Since 2007, academic and university libraries have embraced openness and explained it to academics. Starting in 2019, the academic library of the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technology (USUST) has been working on OER locally (for teachers and librarians), nationally (for university librarians), and internationally. The experience gained with the European Network of Open Education Librarians, e.g. in workshops, survey participation, translating OER into Ukrainian or via contacts from different countries, has been extremely useful.
At the university level, faculty discussions on the benefits and opportunities of OER for distance or blended learning (e.g. during the COVID-19 pandemic) are ongoing. However, the interest of teachers/authors has been limited to isolated cases until now.
But the librarians continued their "Small Step Tactics - Little by little, but constantly!"
During wartime, the USUST's rector and vice-rectors have given more of a green light to the OER community, supporting the library's calls for introducing new models of information support for distance learning in Ukrainian. As a result, we have held meetings with key stakeholders; started conducting library consultations for teachers as potential OER authors to cover copyright and licencing. We also saw over 200 academics attend an online event, something we had never seen before. We have looked at technical possibilities to create, curate and preserve open textbooks and use multimedia in them, developed guidelines to produce open textbooks, created an open textbook and placed it in the institutional repository and in the Open Research Library. We have started to develop two new ones.
This has come about through the focus and determination of many USUST teachers and librarians. They share noble and strategic goals of great importance. This undertaking protects social justice and inclusion for current and future generations of students. It is crucial for those wounded in this war who will not be able to attend university physically but WANT TO STUDY AND HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO IT.
By attending this session, attendees will be able to:- Learn more about the Ukrainian context of OER and OE
- Have a better perspective on the work Ukrainian Librarians are doing in a time of high-level crisis
- Analyse and discuss which aspects of this experience can inspire them to move forward in their context
