We have just spent a week at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), Madrid, working on the design of a capacity building course on open education that will be delivered next academic year to lecturers at universities in the South Mediterranean region, as part of the OpenMed Project.

During the meetings we had the opportunity to discuss the design, content and structure of the OpenMed course with colleagues from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Italy and Spain, some of which will participate as facilitator in the training, which will focus on know-how and skills to use, reuse and remix Open Educational Resources (OER) and, more generally, assist them with the adoption of Open Educational Practices (OEP).

The training courses will consist of one week of intensive face-to-face training at Politecnico di Torino on September 25-30, 2017 and an online training phase from October 2017 to March 2018.

We are planning to share more details about the OpenMed project and the training course at the upcoming Teaching and Learning conference here at Coventry University, June 22-23, including opportunity for interested academics from Coventry University to get involved.

During our stay we also had the chance to visit Medialab-Prado, “a citizen laboratory of production, research and broadcasting of cultural projects that explores the forms of experimentation and collaborative learning that have emerged from digital networks,” which is part of Madrid City Council. Our visit coincided with the start of the workshop Re-imagining movement in the city: citizen science for a sustainable present, which is part of a very interesting programme called Interactivos?:

Interactivos? events are a hybrid between a production workshop, a seminar and a showcase. A space for reflection, research, and collaborative work is created, in which proposals selected by an international open call are developed, completed and displayed. The process is open to the public from beginning to end. http://medialab-prado.es/interactivos

Juan Freire and Jesús Jara López guided us during the visit and gave us a detailed overview of the fascinating history of the lab and some of the main projects and programmes, many of which are running since it was established in 2008.

The lab is located in a former sawmill in the city centre of Madrid that has been converted into an impressive space for collaboration, including group work rooms, a fablab, an auditorium, a digital façade and even some accommodation for artists-technologists in residence.

Post by Katherine Wimpenny and Daniel Villar-Onrubia