Working Meeting, Belgrade, May 26-27th, 2014
On May 26-27, 2014 a BAEKTEL Working Meeting was held in Belgrade, Serbia, gathering representatives from all academic partners from Serbia, University of Banja Luka and University “Mediterranean”. On the second day of the meeting a formal visit of the Tempus-Erasmus+ office of Serbia was hosted, attended by University of Belgrade vice-rector for international cooperation professor Dalibor Soldatić .
At the Working Meeting, a plan of mobility in the forthcoming months was defined, and specific issues of financial transactions related to travel documents were discussed, followed by an overview of activities related to Dev 1.3 and WP2.
Within the activities related to Dev 1.3 a presentation regarding current legal and technological conditions pertaining to OER in Serbia was given by each of the Serbian partner universities: UB, UNIKG and UNI. After that, UBL presented the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and UNIM the state of affairs in Montenegro.
The presenters assessed the situation in the region from different angles, and offered several examples of OER in practice, but the common conclusion was that OER are scarce and generally of modest content, with no possibilities for search offered. The need for promotion of the concept of open knowledge resources and motivation for production of on-line courses was stressed. As for the legislation regulating OER publishing and use it is practically non-existent and a common conclusion was that one of the project results could be a regional initiative for regulating this matter.
The general approach to organizing the resource storage was discussed, and the conclusion was that it should be a two-tier system: the top level an application containing meta-data, which should be centralized, with the bottom level containing the resources proper, not necessarily organized in a unique manner.
It has been agreed that until the next meeting in Podgorica each of the partner universities should test several available software solutions for both system tiers, such as edX, Sakai, OpenMooc, NotreDAM and ResourceSpace. It was also agreed that a list of criteria should be established in order to assess each of the potential solutions, and thus reach an optimal decision.
At the beginning of the visit of the Tempus Erasmus+ office Serbia Marija Filipović-Ožegović informed the project partners that the aim of their visit is to get acquainted with the circumstances under which the initial project activities are developing , plans of forthcoming activities and possible problems in project realization.
Professor Ivan Obradović presented the project site www.baektel.eu and the project development platform available at https://rgfrs.sharepoint.com/sites/baektel, which will serve for communication and collaboration during project development. He also offered a brief overview of the current development of the project, and mentioned some initial administrative problems that are being successfully resolved.
The importance of the project, especially for partner universities, and the conditions for its sustainability were further discussed. Professor Danijela Milošević pointed out that systems already exist at University of Kragujevac which could include resources developed within the project, while professor Zoran Nikolić stressed the possibilities of including OER in educational strategies and university regulations, which would secure that OER development becomes mandatory for universities after project completion. Marija Filipović-Ožegović suggested that EU documents regulating strategies of including ICT in HE should be analyzed.
Vice-rector Soldatić pointed out the Strategy of internationalization adopted at the University of Belgrade, as well as the Action plan of internationalization that is in preparation, which will support the project goals. He added that establishing a link between the academia and the enterprises should be one of the important goals.
Representatives of the Tempus-Erasmus+ office have also been informed that the cooperation and inter-project coaching with other Tempus projects, such as INCOMING and NeReLa is already underway, whereas plans exists for similar initiatives with several other project teams.
Photo gallery is available on official facebook page [link].
