Inside / Making of Open Education Week

Managing Open Education Week, one of my major responsibilities at Open Education Global, is just well sort of over… well not really over as I have managed to munge it out in time beyond the March 2-6 dates.

I’ve been recasting it for the last three years but yikes, have yet really to blog about it. This could be a long rambler, a good chunk on the WordPress engine, but also some redirectional efforts that I felt it needed.

The concept is simple and beautiful- it’s an event that we don’t really organize in the typical conference like approach of planning schedules and sessions and dealing with calls for proposals. It’s completely distributed. It’s been going on since 2012 and it goes “Way Back”

OEWeek as we shorten it sits along side other “weeks” like Open Access Week, National Library Week (ALA) and many more, with the goal of brining attention to the accomplishments and efforts of these, for this week, champion the broad idea of Open Education.

The basic parts are a web site with a form where anyone who is organizing their own event (it need not be online, some of the best ones listed are in person) can add it to a global calendar and another part where typically we would collect a bunch of shared open resources.

At OEGlobal in the BA (Before Alan) period it certainly functioned perfectly fine. I can’t say for sure all of the “how” parts, but it was developed by someone versatile in python and a Django database. Hardly anyone should care about that, its main goal are those two major components — and a whole ton of promotion, etc.

Before the Details. the Metaphor

I have to almost always have a metaphor for a project. And thankfully we have a brilliant graphic designer Mario Badilla who brings it to life with not only images, but a whole suite of graphic elements.

In thinking of the idea of a global gathering, my mind when to the lessons of the UDG Agora project and the model of the town square, a place in cities and towns and villages where people gather. Thus we had many visual iterations of this theme for our site and social media

What works so well for this is that Mario creates an entire suite of media- banners, social media images, slide deck templates, Canva flyer te mplates, zoom backgrounds that we make available as an OEWeek Visuals Kit all shared CC-BY.

I have to say how remarkable it is to see these remixed foir events across the US, Canada, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Africa, Europe… it’s a beautiful thing to see entries come in where the images are customized for local use.

My own bit is using them to create an OEWeek Remixable Digital Postcard courtesy of Bryan Mathers / Visual Thinkery’s Fabulous Remixer Machine. Just my starting with the exampe below, anyone can upload their own image, stamp, and change the text. In about 10 minutes you can generate your own card. Examples can be seend in the gallery below any link to a remixed card, say for the one created by Frontiers for Young Minds.

Let’s move on to the details under the hood of the site.

Event Data, Ought to Be Highly Structured, Right?

There is some sarcasm there, because dealing with events happening in different time zones for input is tricky, not to mention making times meaningful for people in other time zones. You have issues of language, do you “force” English (I say no). And events range from a one hour workshop webinar at a fixed time and date, to a university’s week long program of maybe 6 events, to other extended activities like photo competitions or Wikipedia editing campaigns that go on for weeks.

And I as I will detail (maybe) below, this turns out to be like many of the systems I set up, well meaning and semi-designed up front, but to some degree, end up requiring a bit more of manual managing than would be labeled as “efficient”.

I Edit Everything

So for 2026 I have to admit I had to manually edit or at least check nearly all the details of 262 some events. But you know the flip side of looking at them all up close and not trusting something automated is that you get to know them in great detail.

And another thing I find is that no matter how well I think I design web forms, I see so much some lack of say, webness, in the entries. The typical thing that happens is if you are entering events from Zippity Do University’s Library, you likely are copying inf rom from your own site or calendar system, where all the folks at Zippity Do U know the library, and title it “Join the Open Education Adventure” and the text says “Come to the library for ….”

So I end up editing to add the organization so it’s more clear on a wider scale calendar where the event is happening. That’s not really a fault of the person entering the info, it’s the nature of context. But the other thing I see all too often is how little folks seem to think or bother with hypertext. We offer a rich text editor (and you can copy/patse from other sites), but so often I see mention of research projects or publications ot new software or an OER that are entered without any links.

I’m obsessive about links, so I spend a lot of time in reviewing entries looking up URLs and making links. I can’t help myself.

And another issue is we ask for the name of an organization planning the event, a web address, plus a city and state (the latter so we can geolocate at least generally on a global map). On our redesign this year, something slipped (blame me) and the city/country were not mandatory. SO often I am looking at the university web sites and scanning the footers to find the info. For good number of them, its not always findable. I admit I have goptten great use by entering in Google “Where is Zippity Do University based” and so often the AI summary was spot on, saving that time of digging through web sites.

Moving Open Education Week To WordPress in 2024

Skip this part if you are not into the tech nerdery.

On taking over this project I wanted a more modern platform and also one I was most familiar with. After looking at a few of the event plugin options, I chose The Events Calendar. You can certainly do a good amount for a single organizations events with the free version, but we paid for the Pro version to also get the Community add on to enable the ability for site users to add events and the Filter Bar one for more advanced search.

Another thing I was thankful for is that the project had funds to hire an expert with this plugin we found through Codeable, she is Vancouver based Jenny Chang who has been phenomenal for working with my specialized requests. She has done a lot of customizations, one of the first key ones dealing with time zones since this a global thing.

Jenny installed the User Registration plugin that allows event contributors to create basic WordPress accounts, they have the lowest access role of Contributor. It removes access completely to the Dashboard, allowing access to use the form to create events, and also a basic front end account interface that gives access to submitted events. I like this as it means (in theory) they can edit their event information at any time. The “in theory” part is with the current state of email filters, many times their emails for accoutn creation get eaten. I generally have to manually approve 15% of the accounts.

For the form itself, well it’s a fun challenge to set up one form to handle a wide range of event types, and not be overly tedious to use. Mostly, forms are always tedious, so no claims of perfection, but we do have hundreds of ones created each year. For a quick overview, screenshots of the form parts:

The form stuff includes for the first half

• Title (no explanation needed, eh?)
• Description Our previous entry form was text only, so having a rich text editor is a bonus. It can easily be copied with formatting from other sites or documents
• Event Time and Date: We set the default start date for the first Monday of OEWeek. A good number of entries have errors in the end date/time, so all are reviewed. The time zone works almost perfectly, and is ideal as someone can enter dates and local times.
• Event Image: Entries look better with images, but we have not made it required. A good number of submissions lack them, and because I like the visuals, often I am screen shotting or finding images from the event details. Also, I really hate that the plugin just provides a form element for upload, someone cannot enter alternative text. Plus if they enter a series of events all with the same imagre, they have to upload multiple copies. I have done WordPress themes where you allow access to the media uploader (and only see media a user has uploaded).
• Event website: In my dreams, all events have a permalink so the information can be found post event, and even with updates with links to recordings and resources. More typical is an entry in a library’s calendar or often the zoom registration page.
• Additional Fields: I do like that The Events Calendar allows us to custom create more field elements, which include:
  • Watch / Join / Register Link: For online events this should be the webinar direct link omr where to signup to access, or even. a live stream link. Sometimes they put it in the event web site link and leave blank, sometimes they forget. So I check them all to make sure ones is present.
  • Languages: Hey, this is global and we want to show events that are offered in different languages, and have that be a filter option. It is designed to allow multiple choices. A few cases, planners have an event about courses or OERs offered in different languages and they check a bunch. It is supposed to be just the language that the event will take place in.

And for the second half:

• Event Categories. We have a preset list of categories like “Open Education Practices”, “Open Education Resources”, “Artificial Intelligence”. One can select multiple ones. I can’t say for certain how vaulable it is, but it creates the possibility to filter by topics. I do not ffer access to ad tags, as it just gets messy. Instead, I use tags on the admin side for other categorizations we use to associate events like “Member Events”, “Community College Events”, “Featured Events” etc.
• Organizer Details. Add info about the event organizer(s) including title, web site, city/state. It creates an entry in another data area, so once you create one fo Zippity Do Dah University, you can simply select again without repeated entry.
• OEGlobal Member. We want to be able to organize all events by member. People will check almost any box, so I end up cross checking them all against our membership database.
• Event Mode. Indicate if it is in person, online, or hybrid. Last year, we had a few complaints that events where listed as online, but registration required logging in to a university account. So I added a new one for “Online Limited Audience”. That may not have been clear as a few events checked it because there was a cap in numbers for online.
• Event Format: This is meant to show if an event is a panel discussion, presentation, workshop, activity, etc.
• Social Media Platform: This one is by request of our Communications Directory for use in mentioning accounts when publicizing in The Socials. Again, it’s messy as people will enter URLs or name, or @names. I tried to cast it as their primary account, with a dropdown to indicate platform. The data ends up messy.

There is more detail than anyone possibly cares about the darn form. It’s a lot, but again, folks managed it fairly well.

Taking Away Time Zone Math

This includes auto detection of the browser setting for time zone, and making that the choice in the top right menu, to assign what local time events are displayed in (one can always choose a different one, to see times in Kuala Lumpur time). I never want to force site visitors to do timezone map or fiddle with some external date/time calculator.

This works in conjunction with the Add Event form, where the default is one’s local time, but someone could enter an event for another location. Again, I wanted first and foremost, for those creating events, to enter in local time. It also admins on the admin side, I can change time zones too if needed:

Events Mapped

One hurdle the first two years is that The Events Calendar associates events with information about the Organizer (or host) but separately it has a post type data structure for Location. The latter got tricky, because for online events or and ones with guests from multiple countries, where do you map it? I ended up making a fictitious one called Online from Multiple Locations that was mapped by latitude/longitude somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.

That was an ugly hack, and I had to enable it manually for many events.

The reason for all this is I wanted to make use of The Events Calendar to show for any selection of events, a Map View, e.g.

For many uses you need detailed location, like a street address. But for the purposes of global mapping, all we really want is city, country or city, state/province/territory, country.

The change Jenny was able to in 2026 was to make the location fields part of the form information entered for the host organization- thus the map is less about the location of the events, but the location of event hosts. This supports the goal of just being able to show that events were going on in m any places.

Fun With Time

The Events Calendar primarily focuses on events in the future. It does have some useful things, like a link to show what is happening on the current day https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/activities/today/ or on a specific day https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/activities/2026-03-05/ and a way to do searches for say events about H5P https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/activities/list/?tribe-bar-search=h5p

But what is listed is only events in the future. The plugin really does not help much with finding past events. You have to know to click the little “previous” button, and post OEWeek we will change links to include the parameter to force a view of past events https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/activities/list/?tribe-bar-search=h5p&eventDisplay=past

I do wish it had more functionality for being an archive. The data is there, but I am, still wrestling with making it more navigable. I would guess most use cases are not building an archive of hundreds of past events (we are notw at 850+ for three years).

The other issue that came up the first two years is that something like an activity that went from March 1 – April 1 would end up being listed at the top of events for every day in March. It got cluttered with date/time specific events and multiday events / activities.

So with Jenny’s help again this year we split them out. The main calendar lists what I think of as things you would add to a personal calendar, something happend on Tuesday at 10:00am to 11:00am. Things that went on for a week, a month, etc we internally called “campaigns” and I designated them when reviewing by adding a campaign tag so it shows up in a separate listing I called Ongoing Activities.

One of my favorite examples that happens every year is the TUDelft Open Photo Competition called We Like Sharing:

Open Photo Competition 2026

I feel it works more cleanly, but hard to say for sure. We had to add a few more customizations to add labels to indicate something was in this category and navigation to return to the main calendar.

Not to repeat myself, but event data seems simple until you have a pile of a hundreds of them. I cannot claim it’s optimal, but the organization and capabilities we get with a WordPress platform and all of its extra affordances (multiple taxonomy, plugins, RSS feeds, pagination, search) add so much more than the customized scripted python platform we had before.

Hey! Why Not Federate?

Completely on the margins of most people’s interest, but because I have actively been doing stuff on my own WordPress sites with the ActivityPub plugin when I came across the EventBridge plugin I felt it was worth a play. This is designed to work with an events system like we have to push events out to the Fediverse where Billions and Billions of people are looking for them.

Hah.

If you are in the Fediverse you can search for the account via it’s handle @sharing@oeweek.oeglobal.org or any event URL https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/activity/omp-fest/

This was just more of my own experiment, my colleagues are not all that interested in the fediverse. But hey we have 13 followers (2 are me).

Flipping the Open Asset / Resource Collection

The other side of the events coin for Open Education Week was always (BA, Before Alan) a call to share what was called “Open Assets” or anything created and openly shared to support open education (pretty much what folks think of as OER).

And the approach was the usual idea- create a form to submit them, organize into a public collection, and call it done. Educators love lists of links and curating resources, and I have done my share (long ago at Maricopa I had one called the Bag of URLs).

And OEGlobal has a collection of 700+ of them collected 2015-2023. That’s fine. Another set of links and something to add to the list of numbers each year. But maintain link lists is a pain, many go sour. When I took over in 2024, I wondered we were we collecting Yet Another Resource Collection when there are so many existing repositories existing around the world?

So I flipped the approach. Instead of collecting in our own bespoke database, does it not serve the larger “commons” if people share them in existing repositories? There are big major ones but also many regional repositories that can all use “more stuff”. In 2024 I tried to compile a list of suggestions, and we asked that OEWeek participants share where they chose, and we aske them to let us know what and where via a Google form.

Expanding the World’s Collection of Open Assets for Open Education Week 2024

This allowed than a summary posted through the form’s data sheet, maybe about 150 or so assets added to Other People’s Repositories.

In 2025 I decided to augment that approach with providing three pathways to consider (and still asking to share anywhere). We set up detailed instruction pages, summary pages for two selected examples, not because they are “best” but at least show different approaches to the same end.

See the current set for A Global Collection of Open Assets shared for Open Education Week 2026. I see the way OEWeek gathers events as a way of showing to the world a taste of what is going on globally in education, the same is done for assets shared during this period. Ideally it says, these are important Open Education works we have created or see created that are relevant now.

The paths we offer are

• OER Commons because it is rather large, global, and for the most part, all you need add is a URL for some open licensed content. The ISKME librarians there do all the review work, and I think Peter Musser for helping us set it up, but also letting us build a public curated collection for all OER added in 2025 (81 collected) and for 2026 (50 so far). See Getting Started with OER Commons for OEWeek for the guided tour.
• OER World Map is relevant for its map metaphor. It was an early concept put out in maybe 2012, then it lapsed/expired and was brought back to life with the support from agencies in Germany. It’s a little more complex to use, but the map approach is ideal to me. Just by creating an account, people are added to the map. And anyone can add institutions, projects, policies, services. It’s a bit harder getting folks to use this, we ask them to tag new items oeweek26. A few do, I admit that I do a lot myself my monitoring recent activity. I owe a thanks to Susanne Grimm from the project for guidance and support. See Getting Started with the OER World Map for OEWeek for its own guided tour.
• OEG Connect is by my own obligation (and good idea for our organization) a suggestion as its an open community space for OEGlobal. I set up a space in this Discourse powered community for OEWeek and specifically a Share OE Week space for sharing— well anything, resources, reviews of sessions, just wild ideas. The traffic is pretty low and Mostly Alan. It is so uphill getting people to engage in anything that is not Social Media Like Button clicking. That’s why I even organized a live streamed discussion about the state of open education communities.
• Share anywhere. I added back in the 2024 approach of a simple form for people to “Share where they share”. I got 4 so far.

I don’t know what to do going forward. This approach really has made sense to me. What a better way to support and expand open resources by sharing anywhere, and in repositories that are Better Than Anything I Could Make. Maybe GenAI is amking all of this redundant (that was sarcasm).

And all of this is relevant into a current month long activity (it’s listed on our ongoing activities) for a multiblog multilingual series “Sharing is a challenge” published in collaboration with the UNESCO RELIA Chair and the UNITWIN-UNOE network. It is a 16 topic series.

I have even duct taped together with that supposedly dead technology of RSS a hub to syndicate all posts from the 3 sites into one interface at https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/16-challenges/ (for anyone who cares, I subscribe to a set of 7 RSS feeds in different languages from 3 blogs in an Inoreader folder which in turn offers one single feed). RSS is a Thing! Believe it or not.

Well reader, if anyone has gotten this far, leat me virtually shake your hand and say thanks. I just wanted to get my own thoughts down while just coming off the main focus of Open Education Week.

Despite any complaints I have on soliciting sharing, I do find this work rewarding. Wading through the details of 250+ submitted events, getting to know folks when they write because something does not work, seeing at least some contributions in the asset sharing is rewarding to get glimpses of what’s happening in the world.

Okay this post is too long and two dogs are looking at me eager to walk.

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Featured Image: Composite of screen shots of the 2026 Open Education Week website and the WordPress dashboard view of an event entry. Created by me, Alan Levine, with my own two hands, well mostly Photoshop, shared anyway you like, call it CC BY.