“My dream would be to have a centralized OER repository for students like GitHub”
Name: Giulia Boggiali
Position: student
Expertise: Free and open source software
Institution: Politecnico di Milano
Country: Italy Video
An interview with Giulia Boggiali on 18 August 2021
Can you tell us a bit about your work with OER or open pedagogy more broadly. How did you come to be involved in Open Education? Have librarians supported you on that Open Education journey?
I learned about Open Education through my passion for open software, which I developed when I joined POuL, which is Politecnico Open unix Labs, as soon as I started university. What this computer club does is organize courses about free and open technologies. And in doing that, we also do Open Education, because these courses are free and open to everyone, both from Politecnico and from outside, and recordings and slides are released with an open license on our website. About librarians, unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to work with them yet, but I look forward to doing that in the future.
Who has benefited from Open Education at your institution, Politecnico di Milano, as well as beyond it, and what would you say have been the key benefits?
I’d say for sure students, first of all. I’m thinking of both the courses that we organize and are followed mostly by students, also by some others, but not that many. But I think the greatest benefit was by far the sharing of notes and stuff in general to help you study for exams. Personally I’ve never had to buy a book throughout my university career, and I’ve always studied using materials provided by other fellow students or even professors. I think professors could also benefit from Open Education in sharing for example slides or materials in general in order to provide better lessons.
What do you see as key successes in the Open Education movement as a whole, so far, starting from your own experience?
I’m very happy about all the work that POuL has done. We do receive financial help from Politecnico, for example they pay for posters or for the classes that we use. But, everything else is organized just by volunteers and we do the course, we do the recording, some of us actually even draw the design of the manifests. I think that it’s really inspiring, the fact that people care about sharing the knowledge about open software so much that they do all this work for free.
What still needs to be done for Open Education to truly take hold? What are the most pressing challenges?
I think there’s a lot of education that needs to be done. For example, as I was saying before, we need to teach people about licenses, that licenses exist and that they’re actually good both for you, for the person who uses your material and for the material itself, and I think for that side of the problem students need to learn a lot but so do professors. I think that students kind of already know and appreciate the possible benefits of sharing material. Maybe professors might be a little bit less enthusiastic. I’ve had some professors who actually shared a ton of material, even by previous students. Others who are a lot less inclined to do so, and I think those professors would need to be educated to the fact that sharing can be beneficial for everyone and it doesn’t mean that your work gets stolen, it means that your work gets reused and maybe (it’s) even made better.
What you're suggesting is to start from the background knowledge around the licenses themselves as an enabler in itself in order to better understand what the benefits are, is that right?
My dream would be to have a centralized repository where everyone can upload their notes and other students can use them or open issues and pull requests, kind of like GitHub, in order to change them and, of course, everything would have to have a license.
Yes, definitely. I think we need to teach what the benefits are and, of course, teaching about licenses is vital to that. Then once we’ve taught people that, we could also start working on better tools to share; for example, whenever I found the notes I studied with I always found them on random websites or groups or all in different places. My dream would be to have a centralized repository where everyone can upload their notes and other students can use them or open issues and pull requests, kind of like GitHub, in order to change them and, of course, everything would have to have a license.
Do you foresee any specific role for librarians in this? Do you also foresee that the experience that you had at POuL with sharing teaching materials and the lessons themselves might be good practice to be shared with teachers, in order to let them know how things can work with open licenses?
What better person than a librarian to take care of this repository? I mean, after all a library is an open repository of knowledge already.
For sure! I think POuL is a pretty successful example of open culture and open education. Openness in general.
And what are your plans for the future of Open Education?
I don’t know. I mean me personally I’m going to finish school soon, hopefully, and I really hope I can keep on giving to Open Education, even in my work life.
Is there anything else you would like to add, or anything else you would like to ask for, or to say to librarians who are maybe listening to us or watching this video?
Thank you for what you’re doing already, for open knowledge and I hope we can help each other open even more.
Copyright: Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 Licence SPARC Europe
To more champions >
Comments are closed.