Openness in Education ioe12 Community

"Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field - Genomics. No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings.

It has not been an easy decision. Some may feel that I'm grandstanding or making a futile gesture. And it may be a toxic career move. Scientists are expected to contribute to the community by reviewing papers and serving on editorial boards. But I cannot stand by any longer while access to scientific resources is restricted."

The European Union is set to throw the weight of its €80 billion (£64 billion) research funding programme behind open-access publishing, Times Higher Education has learned.

An official at the European Commission, which is drafting proposals for the Horizon 2020 programme, said that for researchers receiving funding from its programme between 2014 and 2020, open-access publishing "will be the norm".

"Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years. And schools like M.I.T. and Stanford have been offering lectures for free online. Coursera is the next step: building an interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a system of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding certificates of completion of a course for under $100. (Sounds like a good deal. Tuition at the real-life Stanford is over $40,000 a year.) Coursera is starting with 40 courses online - from computing to the humanities - offered by professors from Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. "

"Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education's mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations. "

In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans - one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world - Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

"In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members.

Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license.

Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks."

The OpenScout project invites you to a series of four webinars showing you how you can take full advantage of Business and Management Open Educational Resources (OER). Do you also recognize a growing need to improve your Business and Management skills but are confronted with a lack of time or financial resources to keep up with the latest developments? Are you a student in Business and would like to learn with high-quality, up-to-date, yet free learning materials? Are you a teacher of Business and Management and would like to re-use or adapt existing learning materials of competent peers to enhance your learning offerings? Are you a Business and Management institution looking for new distribution channels for your open learning materials?

"Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase "free-range learning" to describe students' behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says."

"From our perspective, we view textbook publishers as highly exploitative," Justin Goss, a student senator at UC Davis, told members of the Senate Education Committee. "While I am sure that they are perfectly nice people, it continues to baffle me why a reordered table of contents and a shiny new binding warrants and additional $50, $60, or sometimes $100 on the price tag."

"Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls."

"The OBI is the 'plumbing' of the badge ecosystem. It is a specification for badges, set of repositories ("Backpacks") for storing badges and APIs for pushing badges in and pulling badges out. It's an important piece of this badge experiment because it moves us beyond more silo'd systems, allows the learner to collect badges from lots of different learning experiences and provides the structural components to enable badges to be transferred and leveraged across the ecosystem for real results like jobs or credits."

Now, with $16 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the two professors officially launched Coursera, their new online education company that includes partnerships with Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania to offer web-based classes on the Coursera platform for free. A total of 37 undergraduate and graduate-level courses across a broad range of disciplines will launch this spring.

"That's what you have to reckon with. Helped along by technology, that open culture has grown much stronger in the 10 years since another scholarly boycott aimed at publishers helped create the open-access Public Library of Science. Its flagship journal, PLoS One, published almost 14,000 articles last year, according to its publisher, Peter Binfield. "

"Digital Scholarship provides information and commentary about digital copyright, digital curation, digital repository, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues."

"Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals' content is largely provided free by researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very universities that provide the free content and labour. For publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research."

"A generation from now, the show-what-you-know category may be as important as diplomas."

Scientific information is both a researcher's greatest
output and technological innovation's most important
resource. Open Access (OA) is the provision of free access
to peer-reviewed, scholarly and research information to
all. It requires that the rights holder grants worldwide
irrevocable right of access to copy, use, distribute, transmit,
and make derivative works in any format for any lawful
activities with proper attribution to the original author.
Open Access uses Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) to increase and enhance the
dissemination of scholarship. OA is about Freedom,
Flexibility and Fairness.

Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.

"Today Polish Council of Ministers adopted regulation concerning the implementation of „Digital School" program for computerization of Polish schools and raising ICT competences. Pilot of the project aimed for 380 schools in Poland will equip them with hardware (tablets, computers for students, additional equipment). Also digital and free (under Creative Commons Attribution or compatible) textbooks for grades 4-6 in primary schools (K4-K6) will be created (43 millions PLN is assigned for textbooks). This is the first major government project in Poland which creates Open Educational Resources especially textbooks."