Winning Proposals of the 2025 CC Open Education Platform Activity Competition
The CC Open Education Platform is a community group of over 1000 open education enthusiasts, advocates and practitioners around the world. The community meets regularly, shares opportunities and challenges in the field, and collaborates on various open education projects, such as developing Open Educational Resources (OER). The most recent effort included a competition, where community members proposed ideas for CC-funded activities in 2025, and then selected the best project proposals.
Based on community-vote, we now have five winning project proposals to advance open education globally! Summaries of the projects and their anticipated outputs are below. Though some outputs may change. View the full descriptions of all projects for more information.
Next steps include: (1) CC funding the projects in the coming weeks; (2) Community members implementing their projects, providing updates in CC Open Education Platform meetings, and then (3) completing projects and reporting in December, 2025. In the meantime, please join me in cheering for the following projects.
First Place (42 votes)
Point of contact: John Okewole
Location: Nigeria and Ghana
Summary: “Open Education in Practice: Empowering Teacher Candidates (Future Educators) in Teacher Education Programs for Adoption” is a project that empowers future educators to learn, experiment, practice, and receive feedback on open education concepts put into practice. It also seeks to mitigate barriers to open education engagement such as non-availability in curriculum, and lack of structure. The project will showcase the strategic position and impact teacher candidates can have in practicing open education and advancing the potential of open education in K-12 schools.The project will be conducted at teacher training institutions in West Africa, including: Yaba College of Technology Nigeria; Federal College of Education, Akoka Nigeria; Saint Augustine College of Education (affiliated to University of Ibadan) Nigeria; University of Lagos, Nigeria; and COTVET, Ghana.
Teacher candidates are strategically positioned to advance the potentials of open education as they have the perspectives of both student and teacher during their programs of study. They have an opportunity to learn, experiment, practice, and receive feedback before they are fully staffed as teachers. While such opportunities and possibilities have not been fully harnessed in most institutions because of various challenges (Tlili et al, 2022; Menzli et al 2022), this project seeks to implement the strategy and bring such huge potential into limelight.
Anticipated outputs:
- Produce and publish a template for implementation of open education with teacher candidates at teacher education program.
- Five teacher educators and 100 teacher candidates will be empowered for open education in practice.
- Tested solutions to mitigate some barriers of engagement with open education in practice will be published.
- Release of all project resources under CC-BY license to the commons.
- All participants in the project will be encouraged to join the CC Open Education Platform coupled with their own forum of engagement in order to provide persistent support for implementation.
Second Place (36 votes)
Point of Contact: Tetiana Kolesnykova
Location: Ukraine
Summary: This project will translate, localise, and provide feedback on the DEI rubrics and checklists developed by the ENOEL members as part of the multi-institutional open textbook The Art of Reuse and Adaptation: OER as Your Next Step Forward (in progress). This initiative aims to meet the specific needs of Ukrainian teachers and academic library professionals, helping to overcome language barriers and ensure equitable and inclusive access to education in times of a full-scale war, as well as to provide first field-based feedback for further refinement of the ENOEL open textbook and its DEI materials for the benefit of the broader Open community.
Anticipated outputs:
- Timely translated and localised DEI rubrics and checklists.
- Quality, relevant feedback collected from Ukrainian librarians and educators and provided to the ENOEL working group, including actionable insights for further refining the DEI resources and the open textbook.
- Progress toward preparing Ukrainian academic authors and library professionals to undertake future localisation efforts once the open textbook is available and translated.
Three way tie for third place (30 votes each)
Point of Contact: Marcos Vital
Location: Brazil
Summary: This project aims to build a two-piece, hands-on, and self-driven OER course focused on learning and teaching R language. R is a free, open-source and cross-platform programming language mainly used for data analysis and visualization. Even though it was designed as a high level and simple to use language, its learning curve can be steep, and it’s especially challenging for new users that need/want to work with data analysis but don’t have any statistics and/or computing background.
The course will be built with input and direct collaboration with Bachelor’s students from the Universidade Federal de Alagoas Biological Sciences program.
Anticipated outputs:
- The project will create two sets of new OER, building on an open Youtube Playlist called “Aprendendo R” (Learning R), which offers 33 short videos (15 to 30 minutes long) to teach R in a simple, friendly and welcoming way.
- The first set of content will revise and extend the original playlist content with at least 20 hours and a small companion ebook (in addition to R scripts, slides, data and any other material used in classes).
- The second set of content will entail a new, six-hour course: “Ensinando R” (Teaching R), focused on strategies for teaching R to an audience with little to no statistical and programming background (and will also have complementary materials to download).
Point of Contact: Isaac Oloruntimilehin
Location: Nigeria
Summary: The project will train educators on OER and support them in creating freely accessible learning materials using public domain works digitized by Free Knowledge Africa. Through workshops and mentorship, participants will gain the skills to develop and integrate OER into their teaching. Selected educators will also receive seed funding to create capstone projects showcasing innovative applications of OER in their institutions and communities. This will also help to develop the open education community in Nigeria.
Anticipated outputs:
- Training at least 50 educators on OER concepts, licensing, and development.
- Facilitating the creation of at least 20 openly licensed educational resources based on public domain materials.
- Support for 10 capstone projects demonstrating the impact of OER in classrooms and communities.
Point of Contact: Otuo-Akyampong Boakye
Location: Ghana
Summary: Titled “Expanding Open Climate Education to Senior High Schools for Persons with Disabilities,” this project idea stems from the recent Open Climate Education for High Schools effort, which was the first of its kind to create Open Education clubs in Ghana. It seeks to expand the Open Climate Education Initiative to ensure greater inclusivity in climate change education. The project will adapt OER to meet the unique needs of students and people with disabilities, focusing on:
- Co-creating and adapting OER to include sign language translations, braille formats, and other accessibility features.
- Training teachers and librarians in special schools on how to effectively use the adapted OER for inclusive teaching.
- Organizing educational sessions in 10 Senior High Schools for persons with disabilities to raise awareness of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.
- Leveraging Kwix technology to facilitate access to the OER materials in schools with limited internet connectivity.
Anticipated outputs:
- Creation of inclusive OER materials tailored for students with disabilities.
- Training of at least 30 educators and librarians in special schools.
- Implementation of educational sessions in 10 Senior High Schools for persons with disabilities.
- Reports on student engagement, educator feedback, and the adoption of inclusive OER materials.
- These outputs may be scaled based on CC funding available.
If you would like to get involved in CC’s open education community and activities, join us! Contact jennryn [at] creativecommons.org for more details.