Open Learning Environment in Early Modern Low Countries History

This project, part of the individual strand of JISC’s and the Higher Education Academy’s Open Educational Resources pilot programme, will turn a comprehensive survey course in Early Modern Low Countries history, from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century, into a multimedia and Web 2.0 enriched Open Educational Resource (OER), published on the internet and freely available for anyone. In doing so it will create an important teaching and learning resource not only for the strategically important and vulnerable subject area Dutch Studies (as part of Modern Foreign Languages, as defined by HEFCE) but also for all learners with an interest in this European neighbour region of the UK, whose early modern history was closely intertwined with that of Britain (e.g. for students of British or European history). Consequently, a special focus of the OER will be put on relations between the Low Countries and the Anglophone world

Dutch and Belgian artistic and intellectual rivalry in interwar London

This paper compares two major exhibitions of Dutch and Belgian art held in London’s Royal Academy of Art in the 1920s. Part of a new strategy of public diplomacy, both ventures owed much to the initiative of binational friendship associations who, aware of Britain’s importance in diplomatic and commercial terms, saw in displays of their respective artistic heritage a means of projecting their image to a wider but also elite British public. Ironically, the rivalry between these organisations led to an expansion of the scale and scope of their exhibitions that, apart from setting the tone for many similar enterprises to come, necessitated and facilitated increasing international collaboration. Apart from analysing the function of art as ‘cultural capital’ in Dutch and Belgian cultural diplomacy of this time, which was even more complicated by both countries’ joint origins (what counts as ‘Dutch’, what as ‘Belgian’, the further back you go in Low Countries history?), the paper consequently also investigates the ways in which this cultural-diplomatic competition contributed to the development of interwar internationalism

Open Educational Practices in a Lesser-Taught Language Community

This article investigates how Open Educational Resources (OER) and Practices (OEP) can support a ‘strategically important and vulnerable subject’ (SIVS) in the UK, in this case a less-widely taught modern foreign language, namely Dutch Studies. It details the experiences of VirtualDutch, an inter-institutional subject community involving four Dutch departments or sections of Schools of Modern Languages in the UK, that aims to create and share Open Educational Resources and to develop and engage in web-supported forms of inter-institutional collaboration in teaching and learning. After an overview of the VirtualDutch experiences, in particular those in the pilot project in phase 1 of JISC's and the HE Academy's Open Educational Resources Programme (2009/10), the importance of forming communities of both practice and learning around OER for language teaching is highlighted, something particularly, but not exclusively, relevant for less-widely taught subjects like Dutch