The OpenLab at City Tech has won an Open Education Award for Excellence – recognizing contributions to the Open Education community that exemplify excellence in the field. And since the award, 2025 Open Assets Award, includes that the OpenLab is “Recognized as an Open Community,” that means that you, the OpenLab community, have won this award, too!
You can the see range of projects nominated, shortlisted, and selected for the Open Education Awards for Excellence. OE Global is an international organization, and the projects reflect the wide reaches of open education innovation.
Award reviewers had wonderful things to share about City Tech’s OpenLab:
This is an exemplary program. To have built a sustainable operation over 14 years on the back of a start up grant is rare in the Open Education world. The key appears to be creating a truly open community of users who can experiment on the OpenLab platform to create OER in varying shapes and sixes. On top of this the platform itself can easily be replicated and adapted for use by others. I also like the metaphor of a community garden for OpenLab as it implies it is a welcoming and non-threatening environment in which to do want you want to do in teaching and learning.
The OpenLab at City Tech is a highly commendable project that builds an infrastructure for open education and practices at a Hispanic-Serving public college of technology. I find their description of the initiative to be extremely well written and exciting: “In a landscape dominated by proprietary edtech and walled gardens, the OpenLab stands as a community garden of openness, where members can plant seeds together, nurture them, and watch them grow.” There is much to admire here, from the reach of over 47,000 members to the underlying software, Commons in A Box, that is freely and publicly available, and other project aspects.
In lieu of trophies, OE Global will plant a tree in honor of award winners. What a wonderful way to celebrate!
