The aim of the Open Scotland blog is to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education.

Open Scotland operates a shared curation model. Curators are invited to post a minimum or one blog post about any aspect of openness in education to the Open Scotland blog and tweet relevant open education news using the #OpenScot hashtag over the course of a month. If you would like to volunteer to curate Open Scotland, you can sign up here: Open Scotland Curation Sign Up. We welcome curators from all sectors involved in education in Scotland including further and higher education, schools, adult and community learning, training, professional development, galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), health services, and the third sector. For further information please contact Lorna M. Campbell, lorna.m.campbell@icloud.com or Joe Wilson, joewilson@joewilson.net

All curators are required to abide by the Open Scotland Code of Conduct.

Audience

Open Scotland aims to address a wide audience from all sectors of Scottish education, teachers, educators, learners, policy makers and the general public. Your article should be written in language that is accessible to an informed lay audience; please avoid jargon, expand acronyms, and provide additional links where necessary. The tone of blog posts can be informal and conversational or more formal depending on the topic and the preferences on the individual author.

Topics

All aspects of openness in education are in scope, including but not limited to:

• Open education practice
• Open educational resources
• Open policy
• Open assessment practices
• Open textbooks
• Open source software
• Open standards
• Open online courses
• MOOCs
• Wikimedia projects

Blog posts could highlight open initiatives from your own sector or institution, or interesting developments from across the world. We also welcome information about up and coming conferences and events, and reports from events around Scotland and internationally.

Structure and Length

Blog posts do not need to follow a prescribed structure, however a possible structure for your blog post might be as follows:

Opening: briefly (1-2 sentences) outline the topic and its relevance to open education in Scotland.

Main body: 3-4 paragraphs exploring the topic.

Ending: A reflection on future directions; links to further information and resources.

There is no recommended length for Open Scotland blog posts, but you may want to aim for 500 – 1000 words, though longer and shorter posts are perfectly acceptable too.

Copyright and Licensing

Copyright of all blog posts published on the Open Scotland blog resides with the original author. All blog posts should be published under a CC BY or CC BY SA licence.

Open Scotland is happy host blog posts originally published elsewhere as long as you are the copyright holder of the original post, or you have permission to repost it from the copyright holder.

Images, Media and Third Party Resources

If you add images or media to your blog post, and you are not the copyright holder of these resources, please ensure that they have been released under an open license, are in the public domain or can be legitimately used under the terms of UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act Fair Dealing exceptions. All images, media and third party resources must be appropriately attributed.

Biography

You may wish to include a short biography at the end of your post.