Tanja, Dean of School of Engineering and Management at the University of Nova Gorica, teaches and researches knowledge management described her long interest in interdisciplinary projects “especially international projects where collaboration goes beyond borders of any kind.” Her colleague Mitja described a few of the “many hats” he wears as UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Learning and leading the Centre for Knowledge Transfer in Information Technologies (CT3) at Jožef Stefan Institute. His interests are in artificial intelligence (AI) and how it can address global issues and especially open education “My incentive is to try to make a better world though education.”

The genesis of OE4BW came from Tanja and Mitja’s experience at the 2nd World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress hosted 2017 in Ljubljana. With a desire to keep the momentum from that event going, they were inspired by the goals of the Data Science for Social Good project to launch a call for participants interesting in creating SDG aligned open resources who would be matched with experts who could advise them. Just from communication through their network, they accepted 14 project ideas in 2017, and set up the OE4BW structure for setting up mentor relationships and suggestions for online communication, providing some support mechanisms, and planning a year end in person event to meet and share projects. All accepted projects are ones that address a world problem connected to one or more SDGs, identifying an OER solution that will impact society and assure the quality of the developed OER.

Description was taken from the OEG Voices podcast website where you can also listen to the full interview.