The Open Education Awards for Excellence provide annual recognition to outstanding contributions in the Open Education community, recognising exemplary leaders, distinctive open educational resources, and open projects and initiatives.
Gino’s Emerging Leader Award was granted for his enthusiastic and promising leadership qualities. His advocacy and use of open education are inspiring, making him an effective spokesperson for this concept where knowledge is openly and freely accessible.
Being an advocate for opening up access to free, high quality, fully accessible education resources, Gino’s runs the University’s OpenEdInfluencers project. He set up an open advocacy strategy at Mandela Uni where students are able to take the lead in bringing this evolution in the provision of teaching and learning resources to the fore and gain work experience, and payment.
This project forms part of the Siyaphumelela Programme’s funding cycle, via the Kresge Foundation. The recent Open Education conference featured a video which Gino produced and directed, profiling the initiatives undertaken thus far. This project has in now recognised and being locally, nationally and globally.
This has supported recognition for Gino and his election to the Programme Committee on the Open Education Global conference annually, as well as a placement to the UNESCO Open Education for a Better World Advisory Board in 2021. Gino is also a mentor to a socially relevant project, titled Peacebuilding within high-risk communities in South Africa.
Watch a short video about the Open Influencers Project at Mandela University.
The University’s #OpenEdColloquium21 takes place tomorrow from 9am to 2pm, hosted by Chester Missing and Conrad Koch. The hashtags are #disrupt / #decolonise / #develop, with a focus on Open Education for academics and students. Sign up by emailing your details to openedcolloquium@mandela.ac.za by 16th November and the Zoom link will then be shared.