Human rights: international cooperation on learning materials
In the fall of 2022, Peter Dijkstra, senior lecturer at ISO at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, took the initiative to share teaching materials on Human Rights from a professional community.
A professional community is a group of people who actively collaborate in the same field, domain, or discipline and have organized themselves in some form around shared substantive expertise. This professional community emerged from a collaboration between lecturers, researchers, lecturers, and social work professionals in the Netherlands and Flanders.
The initiative arose from the need for teaching materials for higher education on Human Rights. The community developed these materials itself because no existing materials were available. This material consists of a manual with a clear curriculum suitable for higher professional education. You will find several examples of how to translate human rights into concrete learning activities. It is available in both Dutch and English.
The community aims for:
- Thematic bundling of open educational resources: This material can be incorporated into social work curricula and, in the future, also into other domains such as technology and healthcare. It includes concrete educational modules and scholarly texts that contribute to the knowledge base of social work and human rights.
- Encouragement of reuse: After publication, the material will be promoted at the participating institutions, making it openly available to other programs. This promotes the use of the material related to current educational themes such as inclusivity and human rights.
- Successful implementation: The initiative will be successful once the developed material is demonstrably used within the curricula of the higher education institutions specializing in social work and the number of lecturers willing to share the material demonstrably increases.
In the fall of 2024 and 2025, work will continue on adding teaching materials on human rights – research in education, practical examples, a glossary, and conferences – so that a complete curriculum and approach will be available for reuse by the end of 2025.
For more information and access to the developed materials, see https://search.edusources.nl/communitys/mensenrechten
Would you like to learn more about this practical example?
Please contact Peter Dijkstra.
Would you like to learn more about how you can use open educational resources in your teaching?
Then contact the Open Education team.