Mongolia

This is the space where a CC Mongolia Affiliate Road Map will be discussed and presented.

A national seminar on Open Educational Resources sponsored by DREAM IT and IDRC was held in Ulaanbaatar in October 2010.

Link: http://bit.ly/DREAMIT_OER_OCT2010

In September 2011, a follow-up workshop on Open Data, Open Government and OER sponsored by IDRC and DREAM IT was also held.

Link: http://bit.ly/DREAMIT_OER_SEPT2011

At the 2011 workshop, two research projects funded by IDRC through DREAM IT presented some of the materials that each would make accessible as OER using CC licenses:  

• Collaborative co-management of natural resource in Mongolia http://www.cbnrm.mn
• Education Wave - training and materials development for pre-school teachers http://www.davlagaa.mn

An OER workshop is took place in Ulaanbaatar on April 17, 2012 hosted by the Mongolian University of Science and Technology (MUST) and UNESCO IITE.

Chiaki Hayashi from the CC Asia office was a guest speaker at the April 17, 2012 event.

Z. Batbold of the DREAM IT Project, funded by the International Development Research Centre (Canada) presented a draft road map for a CC Mongolia Affiliate and invited participation from university, government and NGO representatives who attended the workshop.

On July 4, 2012 an organizational meeting to set up the CC Mongolia affiliate took place at a National OER Seminar in the Hotel Ulaanbaatar. The National Seminar was held to further brief Mongolian educators on OER developments that were taking place worldwide and to discuss the OER Declaration that emerged from the UNESCO World Congress on Open Educational Resources in Paris in June 2012 (http://unesco.org/oercongress/).

The UNESCO Congress brought together Ministers of Education, senior policy makers, expert practitioners, researchers and other relevant stakeholders from around the globe to pass the 2012 Paris OER Declaration. The Declaration marked a historic moment in the growing movement for OER and called on governments worldwide to license publicly funded educational materials as open resources for public use.

Spurred on by the 2012 UNESCO OER Declaration, Dr. Enkhbat Dangaasuren laid out his vision for an Open Network for Education - ONE Mongolia, at the July 2012 national seminar. This included the structural components that would be needed for Mongolia to join the ranks of other nations supporting OER developments. His proposal received enthusiastic support from many of the educators who attended the national seminar. During the period August 2012 to May 2013, DREAM I.T. partners rallied further support within the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors in Mongolia for the ONE Mongolia initiative.

In May 2013, a national seminar on OER was organized in conjunction with the Institute of Teachers’ Professional Development of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and held in The House of Teacher Development. At this national seminar on May 30, 2013, the ONE Mongolia project team announced the pending signing of the Creative Commons Mongolia Affiliate Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and the team officially launched the ONE Mongolia, ONE Academy and ONE Student websites. http://creativecommons.mn

At ONE Academy, a component of ONE Mongolia, over 150 Mongolian video lessons have been made openly available to students, teachers, parents and the public, covering subjects from higher, secondary and primary education to preschool and lifelong learning through its website using a Creative Commons (CC) attribution share-alike licence (CC-BY-SA). The video lessons can be viewed at http://www.one.mn

ONE Student (http://student.one.mn), another component of ONE Mongolia, provides classroom tools powered by Google Education, including Google Drive, Forum, Sites and Gmail to university and school campuses in Mongolia, without the costs and complexities that come with maintaining hardware and software. This free (and advertisement-free) set of customizable tools enables lecturers, teachers and students to work together from anywhere and learn, effectively supported by open and reusable learning resources. B.Burmaa, ONE Mongolia Project Coordinator presented OER, CC and open classroom tools among teachers and students since Nov 2012 to support the use of OER and raise awareness of CC.

Championship and commitment by Dr. Enkhbat and fellow Mongolians, combined with consulting expertise from BCcampus (http://www.bccampus.ca/) and financial support from Canada's International Development Research Centre (http://IDRC.ca) contributed significantly to all these historic milestones.

OER seeds have been widely scattered in Mongolia over the past four years. They are now beginning to blossom.