Background
The Chair’s unique asset is the VideoLectures.Net website which in 2009 was selected by the World Summit Award (WSA) Grand Jury as one of the most outstanding examples of creative and innovative e-Content in the world – the WSA Winner 2009! The competition was strong with 20.000 applications submitted from 157 countries.
In 2013 another recognition came, this time the WSA Online Jury evaluated 200 WSA winners from the last decade and selected what they consider to be the 8 all-time bests: the WSIS+10 Global Champions. VideoLectures.Net was selected as the winner in the “e- Science & Technology” category.
The World Summit Award (WSA) is a part of the United Nations Summit on the Information Society. It represents a unique global competition for the recognition of best e-Content and global creativity. It is a global not-for-profit activity promoting the most outstanding achievements as a flagship partnership initiative of the UN’s Global Alliance for ICT and Development and in close collaboration with UNESCO, UNIDO, ISOC and a world wide network of partners.
These two recognitions and our work and research in Open Education and Open Software were a pre-text in discussing and realising the unique partnership with UNESCO via establishing the Chair on Open Technologies for OER and Open Learning.
