Name: How Can Open Education and Artificial Intelligence Be Sustained to Build a Better World?
Start: 2026-10-08T16:55:00-0400
End: 2026-10-08T17:25:00-0400

All sessions are available online except round tables, special activities, and workshops.

How Can Open Education and Artificial Intelligence Be Sustained to Build a Better World?

Thursday October 8, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT

8 DR6

ID: 33726

The Open Education for Better World OE4BW (https://oe4bw.org/) program was born in 2017 after the second World OER Congress held in Ljubljana, Slovenia.OE4BW is a international, online and tuition free mentoring programme with the goal to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) through the development of Open Education projects in a yearly cycle.After 8 years implemented, it has developed 420 projects by 607 participants from 53 countries, based on voluntary work of a committed group of coordinators and prestigious and high-skilled mentors. Till today, the program has been mostly sustained by the UNESCO Chair in Open Education, Mitja Jermol, and the UNESCO National Commission of Slovenia.Although the continuous work and relative success in some countries like India, the program struggles to strengthen its mission/vision accordingly to its growth and opportunities, posing serious questions on its future sustainability. Also, OE4BW has been allocated as a program in the International Research Center on Artificial Intelligence IRCAI, which obliges and challenges to shift focus towards AI development and deployment.This session will present and discuss the previous attempts and the results of workshops to create a short and mid-term strategy mission for OE4BW (2030), complemented by a sustainability model that creates value and revenue. This sustainability model has to be the foundation to uptake new opportunities within IRCAI, embrace AI in its foresight as a core component, build on successful projects, hubs and countries, exploit recent promising partnerships, explore recognition and credentialing practices.The discussion should lead to connect a lifelong-learning, participatory Open Education approach to enhance design, development and deployment of AI, specially in contributing to the achievement of the SDGs. There is the assumption, also to be discussed, that the focus of AI development should be orientated for solving educational needs and challenges, like continuous teacher-professional development aligned to AI Competence for Teachers (UNESCO). But the underlying questions in these and other scenarios is: how can it be sustainable?

Speakers

Werner Westermann

Can K-12 teachers and students build Open Source AI tools for education?, International Research Center on Artificial Intelligence IRCAI

Werner Westermann Juárez works at the Civic Education Program, at the Library of National Congress of Chile since 2015. He is a History, Geography and Social Sciences Teacher and Bachelor Graduate in History (Pontificia Universidad Católica, Chile) and a Master’s on Open Education... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT
8 DR6 MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track Exploring Emergent Technologies and the Future of Openness

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OEGlobal 2026

Werner Westermann

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OEGlobal 2026

Werner Westermann

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