Open Science and/for Open Education

Sci-GaIA (www.sci-gaia.eu) was an EU funded project that ran from May 2015 to April 2017. Initially set out to create sustainable training to support scientific endeavour through Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa, to better motivate and to establish a clearer route to impact, the project shifted focus to embrace Open Science to better open scientific achievements in Africa across the world. Overall, the Sci-GaIA project made thousands of people made aware of Science Gateways, e-Infrastructures and Open Science and has created a sustainable ecosystem of Open Science compliant, Open Innovation capable and Open Education based collaboration across Africa. It has also addressed several UN Sustainable Development Goals: (3) Good Health and Well-being, (4) Quality Education, (9) Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, (11) Sustainable Cities and Communities, (13) Climate Action and (17) Partnerships for the Goals. Overall the project made effective impacts on African health and public health and, consequently, on the quality and duration of life. The major results of the project related to the theme of the session this abstract is proposed for were: - The creation of the Open Science Platform (sci-gaia.eu), a DevOps-compliant public research e-Infrastructure (both Grid and Cloud Computing based) for projects and applications, which includes a Linked Open Data federation, a standard based Open Access Repository – also for Open Educational Resources – and an online platform for MOOCs. - The creation of more than 120 e-Infrastructure-related training and educational materials (sci-gaia.eu). - The creation and implementation of the e-Research Hackfest (sci-gaia.eu) pedagogical model that uses effective challenge-driven education to train, innovate and create new services, applications and developers. - The creation of 35 Champions (sci-gaia.eu) who have has supported 24 Communities of Practice (sci-gaia.eu), created 7 new Science Gateways (sci-gaia.eu), multiple new services and 5 new Open Data Repositories. - A catalogue (sci-gaia.eu) of 19 new federated services and 30 new applications (sci-gaia.eu), which can also be used for education and training purposes. In this contribution we quickly summarise the Sci-GaIA results, share the lessons learnt and discuss the opportunities for the African Communities of Practices and Higher Education System to leverage and exploit project results. I do the latter presenting two examples I’m contributing to: the creation of the NADRE and the definition of new policy and strategic plans for effective ICT implementation in African Higher Education Systems. The National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia (NADRE) intends to provide researchers, lecturers, students and stakeholders from outside of the academic world access to research works published by Ethiopian universities and research institutions. All public and private universities as well as research institutions will contribute to the NADRE and will provide citizens access to it. The objective of the NADRE is threefold (see agenda.ethernet.edu.et): - To increase the access of academics and citizens in Ethiopia and worldwide to research works published by Ethiopian researchers at one of the Ethiopian universities or research institutions, - To foster the dissemination of research outcomes and make them, as well as their authors, more visible inside and outside the country, and - To spread completed research to other corners of the country in order to allow other researchers to build on it. For the time being, the NADRE will mainly include Master theses, dissertations, journals, articles, conference proceedings as well as all works published by researchers from Ethiopian universities and research institutions as well as from Ethiopian researchers living abroad. All artefacts will be published under Creative Commons licenses and will be tagged with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). In the next few years, African Higher Education & Research System must face and win the unprecedented challenge of re-inventing its mission(s) to create tomorrow’s workers that can fully tap on ICT to find better jobs and improve the quality of their own lives as well as those of their families. Universities should not anymore be only responsible for qualifying the human capital (Education – the “First Mission”) and for producing new knowledge (Research – the “Second Mission”) but they must also engage with societal needs and market demands by linking their activity with their own socio-economic context- the “Third Mission”. The contribution of Higher Education to jobs and growth, and its international attractiveness, should be enhanced through close, effective links between education, research, and innovation – the three sides of the so-called “knowledge triangle”, which is deemed to be the real “engine” of a knowledge society. For all the above, it is my strong conviction that the policy and strategic plans for ICT effective ICT implementation in Africa Higher Education should be aligned to the goal of creating next generation of ICT-conversant people that could improve the quality of the African societies, their digital literacy degree and the continent as a whole. Policies and plans should be framed within the larger design of an Open Science commons, which will sensibly improve higher education, research and innovation on the same foot across Africa. The main goals of carrying out a pervasive implementation of ICTs in the African Higher Education System should be: (i) to promote easy access to ICT resources such as teaching/learning materials, simulation and demonstration tools, scientific publications, and scientific computing power to both the educators and students; (ii) to build an infrastructure that will pool the limited and scattered ICT expertise in the continent into a common platform so as to promote local and international collaboration; (iii) to make African researchers and educators, as well as their scientific and educational products, more visible worldwide so to enhance the attractiveness of African universities and create better curricula that could help reduce the brain drain and contribute to open innovation; (iv) to increase reputation, in order to attract resources to the continent. The presentation has been given in the Session "African Universities Response to the Challenges of the Data Revolution" of SciDataCon-IDW2018 Conference held in Gaborone (Botswana) on November 5-8, 2018.