How BarCamps and Peer-to-Peer Learning Build Open Education Communities
What happens when a space for Open Education is carefully designed—but not fully controlled?
This 10-minute Lightning Talk, created for the 2026 Open Education Conference (OpenEd26), explores what more than 14 years of OERcamp can tell us about participation, peer-to-peer learning and community building in Open Education.
We offer this presentation in various formats. The video includes subtitles. The transcript is available here as a subpage. The original presentation is available as a PDF.
Lightning Talk Video Recording
Sie sehen gerade einen Platzhalterinhalt von YouTube. Um auf den eigentlichen Inhalt zuzugreifen, klicken Sie auf die Schaltfläche unten. Bitte beachten Sie, dass dabei Daten an Drittanbieter weitergegeben werden.
Mehr InformationenOERcamp at OpenEd26: Structure and Emergence—Topics
OERcamp is contributing a 10-minute Lightning Talk to the 2026 Open Education Conference (OpenEd26). Under the title “Structure and Emergence: How BarCamps and Peer-to-Peer Learning Build Open Education Communities,” the talk brings more than 14 years of experience from the German-speaking Open Education community into an international conversation.
OERcamp as a Space for the Open Education Community
At the centre is OERcamp as a recurring space where people from different parts of education can meet around questions of openness. Schools, higher education, civil society, public institutions, policy and practice often approach similar challenges from very different perspectives.
One of the strongest effects of the format is that people do not have to organise around their institutional or professional affiliations. They can organise around a shared question or interest instead. A practitioner from a school, a researcher from higher education and someone with a legal or infrastructural perspective may find themselves working on the same issue in the same session.
In this sense, OERcamp does not simply talk about silos in education. It creates situations in which those silos can be practically crossed.
Why BarCamps and Peer-to-Peer Learning Fit Open Education
The BarCamp format plays an important role in this. The organisers prepare a clear framework, but not a complete programme of sessions. Participants contribute the questions and topics they want to work on together.
This makes the BarCamp more than an event format surrounding Open Education content: its participatory logic resonates with the idea of openness itself. Who can shape the agenda? Who can contribute knowledge? Whose questions matter? And what happens to what is created together?
Peer-to-peer learning is central to this approach. It is not primarily about transferring existing knowledge from one person to another. It is about developing knowledge together: discussing it, challenging it, combining different perspectives and taking a question further than any one participant might have been able to do alone.
Questions, professional experience and different forms of expertise can all become contributions to this shared process.
What 14+ Years of OERcamp Have Taught Us
A long-term perspective reveals something that may seem counterintuitive: the basic BarCamp framework does not need constant reinvention.
Over the years, its value has come precisely from being clear, stable and reliable. Time slots, session planning, facilitation and the basic rules of participation provide a structure that people can understand and rely on. Once that framework is familiar, attention can shift away from the format itself and towards the questions people bring.
In this sense, adaptability does not necessarily come from constantly changing the structure. A stable structure can remain capable of carrying new participants, new questions and new challenges precisely because it does not have to be redesigned each time.
At the same time, Open Education itself does not develop in a simple linear progression. Certain debates return again and again: licensing, centralisation versus decentralisation, or the tension between openness as a principle and openness that works in everyday practice. New participants often encounter questions that others have already discussed before.
Rather than imagining the community as continuously building a higher and higher foundation of settled knowledge, it may therefore be more useful to think of development as a spiral: questions return, but in new contexts, with new participants and often at a different level of experience.
Want to see more? Browse more photos from 14 years of OERcamp via WeTransfer. You can view the complete collection as a gallery directly in your browser or download the photos to your device.
A Real OERcamp Session from Hannover 2025
A session from OERcamp Hannover 2025 provides one concrete example. Starting from current “pain points” around OER and related infrastructures, participants worked across perspectives including metadata and interoperability, motivation and incentives, collaboration around educational materials and the perspective of learners.
The session illustrates how a shared question can become more important than professional affiliation. No single perspective contained the complete answer; different participants contributed different parts of the knowledge needed to develop the discussion.
One result was a public call for a stronger learner perspective in OER, published under CC0. The example shows how a conversation can move between professional and institutional contexts—and how documentation can allow ideas to travel beyond the people who were present in the room.
What Openness Needs: Structure, Participation and Accessibility
Many years of OERcamp practice have also shown that openness does not automatically create inclusion.
A blank agenda can favour people who already feel comfortable with self-organisation, proposing a session or speaking up. Simply lowering barriers for everyone does not necessarily affect everyone equally: those whose barriers are already relatively low may benefit first and make particularly effective use of the openness available to them.
Without additional structures, openness can therefore reproduce—or even reinforce—existing inequalities in participation.
The answer cannot simply be to make everything more open. Open formats also need structures that create additional ways into participation for people whose barriers are higher.
At OERcamp, this has concrete consequences. Orientation, facilitation, different communication channels and different ways of contributing all matter. So do efforts to enable accessible participation, childcare, gender-inclusive language and the possibility of proposing a session without having to step onto a stage in front of a large group.
These measures do not make participation automatically inclusive. But they can lower different thresholds and create more than one route into the shared process.
This is the space between structure and emergence that the Lightning Talk explores: enough structure to make participation possible, and enough openness for questions, connections and knowledge to emerge.
Open Documentation and Continuity
Documentation is another part of this design work. At OERcamp, documentation is not only a record of what happened. Wherever possible, the documentation itself becomes OER.
Session notes, materials, reports, images, design resources and other outputs can remain accessible, reusable and adaptable beyond the event. This matters particularly in a BarCamp, where several sessions take place in parallel and no single participant can experience the whole programme.
Open documentation allows conversations to travel beyond the room and gives other people the possibility to build on what has been created.
It is also one way of creating continuity: questions, ideas and results do not have to disappear when an event ends.
What Can Other Open Education Communities Take from OERcamp?
The transferable lesson is not to copy OERcamp.
It is to ask what kind of structure allows a community to organise around shared questions rather than fixed roles or institutional boundaries—and what additional design is needed so that openness does not only benefit those who already find participation easy.
A clear and reliable framework can create room for constantly changing content. Peer-to-peer learning can move beyond knowledge transfer towards co-construction. And open documentation can help conversations, questions and relationships continue beyond a single event.
The question is therefore not how to reproduce OERcamp elsewhere, but what kind of space an Open Education community needs in order to work on questions that no single institution, role or perspective can answer alone.
0 Kommentare