VISIR believes that successful mainstreaming of Open Education strongly depends on grassroots practices uptake, and has been collecting and analysing evidence from the work of innovators from all over Europe and investigating what are the main barriers and the favourable conditions for mainstreaming bottom-up innovation.
The main result of this work is that, whilst educational systems have responded to policy initiatives that aim to stimulate innovation and promote modernisation, there is some evidence that institutional education environments are often conservative, slow to change and not supportive to grassroots innovation. Educational settings are still based on outmoded ‘industrial’ models which work in a reproductive rather than transformative mode, and are too often based on organisational cultures which are hierarchical, segmented, slow in response to external change and based on an ethic of conservatism.
The VISIR Policy and Practice recommendations are targeted to the three stakeholders categories that must act to make the change possible: policy makers, educational leaders and grassroots innovators, and have been debated and fine-tuned with representatives of these stakeholders along the whole trajectory of VISIR.
